EXCHANGE 


BIOLOGY 

LIBRARY 

G 


THE  COLVER  LECTURES 
IN  BROWN  UNIVERSITY 
1921 


HUMAN  LIFE  AS  THE  BIOLOGIST 

SEES  IT 

BY 
VERNON  KELLOGG 


BROWN  UNIVERSITY.    THE  COLVFJR  ^CTtfEBS,  1921; 


HUMAN  LIFE 

AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 


BY 
VERNON  KELLOGG,  Sc.D.,  LL.D. 

SECRETARY,   NATIONAL  RESEARCH  COUNCIL;  SOMETIME 
PROFESSOR  IN  STANFORD  UNIVERSITY 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
1922 


BIOLOGY 

LIBRARY 

G 


COPYRIGHT,  1922, 
BY  BROWN  UNIVERSITY 

AU  rightt  reserved 


THE  Colver  lectureship  is  provided  by  a  fund  of 
$10,000  presented  to  the  University  by  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Jesse  L.  Rosenberger  of  Chicago  in  memory  of 
Mrs.  Rosenberger's  father,  Charles  K.  Colver  of  the 
class  of  1842.  The  following  sentences  from  the  letter 
accompanying  the  gift  explain  the  purposes  of  the  foun- 
dation:— 

"It  is  desired  that,  so  far  as  possible,  for  these  lectures 
only  subjects  of  particular  importance  and  lecturers  emi- 
nent in  scholarship  or  of  other  marked  qualifications 
shall  be  chosen.  It  is  desired  that  the  lectures  shall  be 
distinctive  and  valuable  contributions  to  human  knowl- 
edge, known  for  their  quality  rather  than  their  number. 
Income,  or  portions  of  income,  not  used  for  lectures  may 
be  used  for  the  publication  of  any  of  the  lectures  deemed 
desirable  to  be  so  published." 

Charles  Kendrick  Colver  (1821-1896)  was  a  graduate 
of  Brown  University  of  the  class  of  1842.  The  necrol- 
ogist of  the  University  wrote  of  him:  "He  was  distin- 
guished for  his  broad  and  accurate  scholarship,  his 
unswerving  personal  integrity,  championship  of  truth, 
and  obedience  to  God  in  his  daily  life.  He  was  severely 
simple  and  unworldly  in  character." 

The  lectures  now  published  in  this  series  are: — 

1916 

The  American  Conception  of  Liberty  and  Government,  by 
Frank  Johnson  Goodnow,  LL.D.,  President  of  Johns 
Hopkins  University. 

1917 

Medical  Research  and  Human  Welfare,  by  W.  W.  Keen, 
M.D.,  LL.D.  (Brown),  Emeritus  Professor  of  Sur- 
gery, Jefferson  Medical  College,  Philadelphia. 

V 


1918 

The  Responsible  State:  A  Reexamination  of  Fundamental 
Political  Doctrines  in  the  Light  of  World  War  and  the 
Menace  of  Anarchism,  by  Franklin  Henry  Giddings, 
LL.D.,  Professor  of  Sociology  and  the  History  of 
Civilization  in  Columbia  University;  sometime  Pro- 
fessor of  Political  Science  in  Bryn  Mawr  College. 

1919 

Democracy:  Discipline:  Peace,  by  William  Roscoe 
Thayer. 

1920 
Plymouth  and  the  Pilgrims,  by  Arthur  Lord. 

1921 

Human  Life  as  the  Biologist  Sees  It,  by  Vernon  Kellogg, 
Sc.D.,  LL.D.,  Secretary,  National  Research  Council; 
sometime  Professor  in  Stanford  University. 


vi 


CONTENTS 
PART  I 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTORY 3 

1.  HUMAN  ORIGIN  AND  RELATIONSHIPS.  ...       8 

2.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  PRESENT  MAN 37 

PART  II 

1.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  WAR 49 

2.  HEREDITY  AND  HUMAN  PROBLEMS 64 

3.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  THE  REPUBLIC  ....     90 

PART  III 

1.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  EVERYDAY  LITE  ...     96 

2.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  DEATH 106 

3.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  SOUL 118 

4.  THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  THE  FUTURE 


vn 


HUMAN  LIFE 
AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 


HUMAN  LIFE 
AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

i 

INTRODUCTORY 

WHILE  engaged  in  the  work  of  Mr. 
Hoover's  relief  organizations  I  saw  a  good 
deal  at  very  close  range  of  the  behavior  of 
men  at  war.  I  saw  a  constant  struggle 
in  the  case  of  some  of  these  men  in  posi- 
tions of  authority  between  two  elements 
in  their  make-up;  a  brute  element  inherent 
in  them  as  a  biologically  inherited  ves- 
tige of  prehistoric  days,  and  a  strictly 
human  element  more  recently  acquired 
and  transmitted  to  them  by  education 
and  social  inheritance.  Sometimes  one  ele- 
ment dictated  their  behavior,  sometimes 
the  other.  Sometimes,  unfortunately, 
the  element  of  education  reinforced  the 
element  of  brute  inheritance.  The  exist- 
3 


HUMAN  LIFE 

ence  and  influence  of  these  two  usually 
conflicting  parts  of  human  make-up  were 
made  especially  clear  and  sharp  because 
of  the  unwonted  and  continuous  stress  of 
the  whole  situation.  It  was  an  unusual 
opportunity  for  the  biologist-student  of 
human  life  to  observe  the  relative  strength 
of  these  two  factors  which  play  their  parts 
in  the  determination  of  the  behavior  and 
fate  of  us  all.  Are  we,  in  our  present 
evolutionary  stage,  more  animal  than 
human  or  more  human  than  animal? 
And  why?  And  can  any  attempt  at 
scientific  analysis  of  present  human 
make-up  give  us  knowledge  that  will 
enable  us  to  live  more  rationally,  more 
successfully,  more  happily? 

As  detached  and  cool-blooded  as  he  can 
possibly  be  in  his  contemplation  of  the 
make-up  and  the  capacities  and  behavior 
of  human  beings,  the  biologist  is  neverthe- 
less often  overcome  by  those  same  feelings 
of  awe  and  reverence  in  the  face  of  the 
"wonders  of  human  life,"  which  over- 
come other  less  cool-blooded  persons. 
4 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

Jn  his  laboratory  and  study  he  may  assure 
himself  that  he  is  dealing  only  with  an 
unusually  complex,  highly-endowed,  and, 
in  every  way,  remarkable  animal,  and 
reassure  himself,  in  the  face  of  the  diffi- 
culties of  the  biological  analysis  of  this 
animal,  by  remembering  how  he  has  been 
able  to  reveal,  and,  in  some  measure, 
explain  the  make-up  and  capacities  of 
other  at  first  baffling  animals.  But  in 
his  home  with  his  family,  and  in  his  social 
intercourse  with  his  friends  and  acquaint- 
ances, he  sometimes  loses  the  confidence 
of  his  laboratory  hours.  My  wife  and 
little  girl  are  confusingly  different  from 
that  impersonal  thing,  man  as  a  lab- 
oratory subject,  which  I  persist  in 
hoping  to  analyze  into  pieces  and  prop- 
erties capable  of  scientific  explanation,  or 
at  least  description.  There  is  something, 
or  many  things,  in  all  the  human  beings  I 
know  personally,  and  something  in  my- 
self, which  make  them  and  me  very  dif- 
ferent from  the  samples  of  the  species 
that  I  study  in  the  laboratory. 
5 


HUMAN  LIFE 

And  yet  as  biologist  I  persist  in  this 
study,  and  I  follow  closely  and  hopefully 
the  similar  studies  of  other  biologists, 
using  this  term  to  mean,  in  this  instance, 
men  variously  called  morphologists,  phys- 
iologists, psychologists,  sociologists,  econ- 
omists, political  scientists,  and  historians, 
some  of  whom  may  object  to  being  called 
biologists  but  most  of  whom  are  glad  to  be 
so  called.  And  in  my  talks  to  you,  at  the 
courteous  invitation  of  the  authorities  of 
Brown  University,  and  as  the  incumbent 
for  this  year  of  the  lectureship  endowed 
by  one  of  Brown's  loyal  and  generous 
alumni,  I  shall  try  to  tell  you  quite  simply 
and  frankly  something  of  the  biologist's 
attitude  toward  human  life  as  a  problem 
he  feels  bound  to  study,  and  of  what  he 
thinks  he  has  found  out  and  what  he 
knows  he  has  not  found  out  in  the  course 
of  his  study  as  so  far  prosecuted. 

I  started  studying  human  life  as  a 

biologist  by  studying  first  plants,  then 

birds,  and,  finally,  and  for  a  long  time, 

insects.    This  might  be  called  my  under- 

6 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

graduate  course  in  human  life.  I  began 
my  graduate  course  first  with  a  baby, — 
my  own — for  special  subject,  and  then  as 
she  grew  older  I  turned  to  something 
easier,  just  men  and  women  with  whom  I 
had  less  personal  relations  and  knew  only 
as  representatives  of  the  animal  species, 
man.  I  found  that  I  could  not  advisedly 
let  my  serious  biological  studies  be  in- 
terfered with  by  such  incidental  but, 
some  way,  very  confusing,  things  as 
sympathy  and  love  and  pride  and  hope. 


HUMAN  LIFE 


HUMAN  ORIGIN  AND 
RELATIONSHIPS 

THE  biologist  pays  much  attention  to 
origins;  often  too  much.  Two  things  can 
have  a  common  or  related  origin  and  yet 
acquire  differences  in  the  course  of  their 
development  which  make,  for  all  practical 
purposes,  two  very  different  things  out  of 
them.  Quantitative  differences  may  come 
to  be  so  great  that  they  have  all  the 
practical  effect  of  qualitative  differences. 
Or  qualitative  differences,  very  small,  in- 
deed, when  measured  by  the  chemist  or 
physicist  and  described  in  the  terminology 
of  their  sciences,  may  have  very  large 
effects  in  the  practical  relation  of  the 
substances  or  things  exhibiting  them. 
The  sugar-loving  man  who  eats  a  little 
of  a  certain  substance  which  the  chemist 
assures  him  is  made  up  of  the  same 
numbers  of  atoms  of  the  same  three 
kinds  of  chemical  elements  of  which 
8 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

sugar  is  composed,  although  these  atoms 
are  arranged  within  the  molecules  in  a 
way  slightly  differing  from  their  arrange- 
ment in  sugar,  may  find  himself  poisoned 
instead  of  strengthened.  Or,  the  man 
who  accepts  the  statement  of  the  zoologi- 
cal morphologist  that  the  nervous  system 
of  a  certain  animal  differs  primarily 
from  that  of  another  in  that  there  is  not 
quite  so  much  of  it,  but  that  it  is,  as  far  as 
it  goes,  of  essentially  the  same  kind,  and 
who  therefore  expects  to  find  his  first 
animal  exhibiting  the  same  kind  of  sense, 
only  not  quite  so  much  of  it,  as  his 
second,  will  be  much  surprised  when  he 
becomes  really  acquainted  with  the  sense 
differences  of  his  two  animals. 

Nevertheless  the  biologist  has  good 
grounds  for  paying  much  attention  to 
commonness  of  origin  and  similarities  of 
structural  make-up  in  his  attempts  to 
read  the  riddle  of  life,  even  human  life. 
Things  that  have  come  from  the  same 
thing,  or  that  have  a  fundamental  like- 
ness of  structure,  are  bound  to  have  some 
9 


HUMAN   LIFE 

commonness  of  capacity  and  behavior. 
And  so  the  biologist  in  his  approach  to 
man  as  a  subject  of  scientific  scrutiny  is 
deeply  interested  in  the  possible  unravel- 
ing of  the  tangled  and  broken  skein  of 
his  biological  history.  Whence  and  how 
has  he  come  into  being?  And  into  being 
in  the  particular  form  and  condition 
which  now  characterize  him?  Can  human 
characteristics  be  found  in  less  complex 
stage  of  development  and  organization 
elsewhere  in  the  world  of  life?  And  if  the 
human  body  shows  no  radical  qualitative 
differences  from  other  animal  bodies  what 
will  be  the  significance  of  this  to  the 
biologist  in  his  attempt  to  study  and 
appraise  human  life? 

As  to  human  origin  the  biologist  finds 
no  tangible  evidence  to  support  any  other 
explanation  than  the  now  familiar  and 
widely-accepted  one  of  evolution  from 
pre-existing  lower  animal  kinds.  For  this 
explanation  he  does  find  what  is,  to  him, 
practically  convincing  evidence.  It  is  of 
no  very  great  interest,  certainly  of  no 
10 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

very  great  importance  to  most  of  us, 
if  we  once  accept  this  evolutionary  ex- 
planation of  origin,  whether  man  is 
traced  backward  to  this  or  that  particular 
kind  of  anthropoid  ape,  or  other  less 
anthropoid  ancestor.  However,  when  we 
watch  a  chimpanzee  for  some  time  we 
come  to  have  a  hope  that  he  is  not  the 
particular  anthropoid  whom  the  biologist 
would  ask  us  to  recognize  with  any 
filial  admiration  or  affection.  The  feeling 
is  even  more  marked  when  the  orang-utan 
or  the  gorilla  is  the  object  of  our  curiosity. 
It  is  true,  though,  that  if  we  watch  a 
chimpanzee  long  enough  a  rather  unset- 
tling feeling  is  likely  to  grow  on  us  that 
there  is  something  uncannily  familiar 
about  him.  He  seems  to  be  a  caricature 
of  some  people  we  know;  he  behaves  curi- 
ously like  some  children,  other  people's 
children,  that  we  recall. 

I  had  an  experience  with  a  chimpanzee 

once  in  Berlin,  which  sticks  always  in  my 

memory.    I  was  giving  at  the  time,  as  a 

student  of  zoology,  some  special  attention 

11 


HUMAN  LIFE 

to  anthropoids,  and  used  to  go  out  almost 
daily  to  the  Zoological  Gardens  where  I 
had  become  acquainted  with  the  keeper 
of  the  apes.  He  had  a  favorite  chimpan- 
zee which  he  used  to  keep  with  him  a 
great  deal  in  his  own  room  or  office,  and 
I  got  into  the  habit  of  dropping  in  fre- 
quently for  an  afternoon  chat  with  the 
friendly  pair.  The  keeper  was  a  rather 
stolid  sort  of  person  who  seemed  to  me  to 
possess  a  marked  paucity  of  human  feeling 
and  expression.  On  the  other  hand  the 
chimpanzee  seemed  possessed  of  a  wide 
range  of  human-like  interests  and  feelings 
and  was  fascinatingly  varied  and  interest- 
ing in  his  expression  of  them.  The  con- 
viction even  grew  on  me  that  he  was 
almost  the  more  human  of  the  two. 
He  rarely  paid  me  the  compliment  of 
showing  any  special  recognition  of  me  or 
interest  in  me.  I  seemed  to  lack  any 
special  traits  of  attractiveness  for  him. 
But  when  one  day,  with  the  permission  of 
the  keeper,  I  brought  an  American  fam- 
ily with  me  who  had  with  them  a  coal 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

black,  extremely  African  negress  as  nurse- 
maid, the  chimpanzee  was  so  animatedly 
friendly  to  this  dear  old  mammy  from  the 
very  first  moment  of  her  entrance  that 
she  soon  fled,  screaming  with  horror  and 
fright.  I  shall  never  forget  the  strong 
impression  made  on  me  of  the  chimpan- 
zee's immediate  apparent  recognition  of 
Matilda  as  an  old  acquaintance;  she  was 
the  kind  of  human  being  he  knew  about 
and  was  interested  in.  Yet  as  he  had  been 
brought  to  the  Gardens  as  a  baby  and 
had  had  really  no  personal  acquaintance- 
ship with  negroes,  if  he  really  knew  Ma- 
tilda or  had  some  sense  of  relationship 
with  her,  it  must  have  been  a  case  of 
biological  memory. 

However,  the  biologist  does  not  claim 
that  we  are  directly  descended  from  the 
chimpanzee  or  any  other  particular  an- 
thropoid or  particular  lower  kind  of 
monkey  that  we  know,  either  living  or 
extinct.  Some  biologists  favor  an  origin 
from  a  generalized  Lemurine  type,  others 
from  a  Tarsius  type,  and  others  venture 
13 


HUMAN  LIFE 

to  claim  a  breaking  away  from  the 
quadrumanous  group  much  higher  up  in 
its  series,  seeing  in  the  anthropoids  and 
man  the  latest  and  highest  two  diverging 
branches  in  the  tall  genealogical  tree  of 
human  ancestry.  That  anthropoid  and 
human  structure  are  too  fundamentally 
and  minutely  similar  to  be  coincidence  or 
anything  else  than  true  homology,  and 
hence  indisputable  evidence  of  a  common- 
ness of  origin,  the  biologist  simply  accepts 
as  a  biological  fact  without  regard  to  his 
feelings  of  friendliness  or  unfriendliness 
for  chimpanzees  and  their  immediate 
relatives. 

I  This  structural  evidence  of  ancestral 
relationship  between  the  anthropoids  and 
man  is,  of  course,  added  to  by  several 
other  well-known  kinds  of  likenesses, 
physiological,  psychological,  and  even 
ecological.  The  similarity  of  the  chemical 
character  of  the  blood  of  the  two  groups 
as  evidenced  by  the  identity  of  its  re- 
actions in  the  face  of  certain  stimulation, 
the  so-called  precipitin  reactions,  these 
14 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

reactions  differing  from  those  of  the 
blood  of  other  higher  mammals,  is  a 
notable  modern  addition  to  the  biological 
evidence  for  anthropoid  and  human  rela- 
tionships. For  the  same  identities  or 
close  similarities  in  blood  character  occur 
in  the  case  of  other  kinds  of  animals  well 
known  to  be  closely  related,  as  the  wolf 
and  dog,  or  the  horse  and  ass,  and  do 
not  occur  when  the  blood  of  two  less 
closely  related  animals  is  tested. 

A  less  important  and  less  well-known 
added  bit  of  evidence  is  one  that  came 
under  my  own  observation  a  few  years 
ago  during  the  course  of  some  study  of 
certain  highly  specialized  external  insect 
parasites  of  man  and  some  other  mam- 
mals. In  this  study  it  became  apparent 
that  the  kinds  of  these  parasites  character- 
istic of  and  limited  to  men  and  apes  are 
more  closely  related  to  each  other  than 
they  are  to  parasitic  kinds  characteristic 
of  the  other  quadrumana  or  of  any  other 
mammals.  That  is,  the  parasites  of  the 
apes  are  even  less  closely  related  to  those 
15 


HUMAN  LIFE 

of  the  other  monkeys  than  they  are  to 
those  of  man.  This  points  to  a  probable 
commonness  of  origin  of  the  now  slightly 
differentiated  parasites  of  men  and  apes 
from  some  parasite  ancestor  which  may 
have  helped  make  life  uncomfortable  for 
certain  common  ancestors  of  the  anthro- 
poids and  early  men. 

The  biologist  finds  another  evidence  of 
man's  place  in  nature  as  simply  one  among 
the  various  groups  of  mammals,  in  the 
conditions  of  the  physical  variation  among 
different  human  races,  or  species,  as  they 
would  likely  be  called  by  any  entirely 
disinterested  student  of  human  kind.  If 
an  expedition  of  scientific  gentlemen  from 
the  Academy  of  Sciences  of  Mars,  say, 
should  some  day  find  its  way  to  our 
planet,  they  would  doubtless  report  to 
their  colleagues,  on  their  return,  the 
discovery  of  a  considerable  number  of 
earth-inhabiting  different  species  of  man, 
and  might  issue  a  classificatory  mono- 
graph on  them  not  unlike  one  of  our  own 
monographs  on  the  various  species  of 
16 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

bears.  Our  attempts  at  classifying  the 
bears,  you  know,  are  attended  by  a  good 
deal  of  discussion  as  to  whether  some  of 
the  different  kinds  are  just  different  races 
or  varieties  of  one  species  or  whether 
they  truly  represent  different  species.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  I  suppose  this  doesn't 
much  worry  the  bears;  it  only  worries  the 
scientists. 

There  is  also  some  suggestive  evidence 
about  man's  position  in  Nature  to  be 
derived  from  the  facts  of  the  geographical 
distribution  of  his  different  races.  The 
suggestiveness  comes  from  the  interesting 
resemblance  of  the  status  of  this  distribu- 
tion to  that  obtaining  generally  among 
the  higher  vertebrates.  Dr.  J.  C.  Mer- 
riam,  the  distinguished  paleontologist  and 
student  of  the  history  of  the  human 
species,  has  especially  stressed  this  fact 
and  its  significance.  Just  as  the  distribu- 
tion of  the  members  of  a  group  of  mam- 
mals or  birds  indicates  in  fairly  clear 
outlines  a  classification  of  these  members 
such  as  would  be  made  on  a  basis  of  their 
17 


HUMAN  LIFE 

comparative  structure,  so  the  different 
subdivisions  of  human  kind  show  a 
similar  parallel  in  their  distribution  and 
structural  similarities  or  dissimilarities. 

Now  the  essential  point  of  all  that  has 
just  been  said  concerning  man's  striking 
structural  similarity  to  certain  higher 
animals  and  concerning  his  likenesses  to 
them  in  other  ways,  physiological,  varia- 
tional  and  distributional,  is  that  in  these 
similarities  the  biologist  finds  convincing 
proof  of  man's  origin  from,  and  definite 
relation  to  other  forms  of  life.  And  this 
must  be  ever  in  our  minds  in  all  our 
subsequent  discussion.  But  before  point- 
ing out  any  of  the  probable  special 
significances  to  the  biologist  student  of 
human  life  of  the  undoubted  evolutionary 
derivation  of  man  from  lower,  non-human 
forms  of  life,  let  us  glance  briefly  at 
another  aspect  of  the  consideration  of 
human  origin,  namely,  the  pre-history 
of  man  as  an  animal  of  unmistakable 
human  estate,  but  of  much  more  primi- 
tive human  culture  than  he  is  at  present, 
18 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

a  history  that  the  discoveries  and  investi- 
gations of  the  last  score  of  years  have 
done  more  to  reveal  than  had  all  study 
previous  to  the  beginning  of  this  century. 

The  search  for  relics  of  man,  both  of  his 
body  and  his  handiwork  or  culture,  may 
be,  and  has,  in  fact,  been,  pursued  in  two 
slightly  different  special  ways.  The  his- 
torian may  trace  man  back  to  the  days  of 
earliest  history  as  recorded  by  preserved 
books  and  scripts.  Then  the  archaeolo- 
gist and  ethnologist  may  carry  the  story, 
ever  more  broken  and  incomplete,  back 
by  study  of  his  scattered  carved  hiero- 
glyphs and  monuments  and  implements. 
Such  studies  take  us  back  to  days  of  the 
earliest  civilizations  of  China  and  Egypt 
and  Asia  Minor  and  Crete. 

Here  the  archaeologist  hands  over  the 
search  to  the  anthropologist  and  paleon- 
tologist, whom  he  finds  have  been  working 
from  the  other  end,  that  is,  from  earlier 
periods  up  to  later  ones  instead  of  from 
later  ones  back  to  earlier  ones,  and  have 
been  working  rather  as  students  of  biol- 
19 


HUMAN  LIFE 

ogy  and  geology  than  students  of  human- 
istics.  Man  for  them  is  an  animal  whose 
evolutionary  history  is  to  be  traced, 
as  that  of  other  animals  is  traced,  by 
finding  and  studying  his  fossils  or  the 
preserved  products  of  his  handiwork,  or 
those  of  his  forebears,  in  their  relation  to 
successive  geologic  formations,  hence  to 
time.  It  is  to  the  paleontologist  and 
historical  anthropologist,  therefore,  that 
we  look  for  facts  concerning  the  very 
earliest  days  of  man's  existence.  How 
far  back  in  geologic  time,  how  long  ago  as 
estimated  in  years  and  centuries,  does 
man  seem  to  have  lived  on  this  earth? 
Where  did  he  live?  Does  he  first  appear 
as  scattered  over  all  the  land  surface  of 
the  globe,  as  he  now  is,  or  was  he  originally 
limited  to  a  certain  part  or  parts  of  it? 
What  sort  of  man  was  he  in  those  first 
man  days?  What  of  his  body?  What  of 
his  habits,  his  culture,  his  relation  as 
individual  to  others  of  his  kind?  Oh, 
there  are  many  crowding  questions  we 
wish  to  put  to  the  student  of  prehistoric 
20 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

man,  too  many  to  enumerate.  And  we 
really  hang  breathless  on  his  answers. 
But  before  we  listen  to  any  of  the  an- 
swers let  us  note  that  the  anthropologist 
in  his  attempts  to  satisfy  his  and  our 
curiosity  about  primitive  man  has  a 
second  string  to  his  bow  in  addition  to 
that  provided  him  primarily  by  the 
paleontologist.  He  recognizes  in  his 
study  of  the  man-group,  just  as  the 
general  biologist  does  in  his  study  of  any 
group  of  animals  or  plants,  that  the 
present  existing  members  of  his  group 
are  not  all  of  equal  evolutionary  advance- 
ment or  chronology.  There  are  always 
some  of  a  type  less  advanced  or  special- 
ized, and  some  of  types  more  advanced. 
The  less  advanced  are  usually  presumed 
to  be  older  in  their  evolutionary  origin 
than  the  more  advanced,  so  that  although 
they  all  live  now  side  by  side  and  at  the 
same  time,  some  may  be  looked  on  as  in  a 
form  or  stage  of  greater  primitiveness  or 
antiquity  as  compared  with  others.  This 
is  indeed  quite  true  of  the  various  living 


HUMAN  LIFE 

kinds  or  races  of  man.  The  native 
Australians,  the  Veddahs  of  Ceylon,  the 
Ainos  of  Japan,  the  Bushmen  of  Central 
Africa  and  several  other  scattered  similar 
small  groups  do  represent  in  their  physical 
structure,  mental  capacity  and  general 
culture  more  primitive  stages  in  human 
evolution  than  those  represented  by  the 
larger  Caucasian,  Mongolian,  Negro  and 
Polynesian  groups  that  comprise  the 
great  majority  of  living  men. 

In  comparing  the  physical  and  men- 
tal character  and  the  culture  of  these 
living  primitive  types  with  the  character 
and  culture  of  various  extinct  types  of 
men,  as  indicated  by  their  recovered 
bones  and  articles  of  handiwork,  the 
anthropologist  finds  such  similarities  that 
he  can  refer  with  some  confidence  to 
these  living  primitive  types  as  paralleling 
in  many  characteristics  some  of  the  more 
recent  types  of  prehistoric  man.  He  has 
not  yet  found  alive  that  missing  link 
between  man  and  the  anthropoids  which 
some  anthropologists  have  fondly  iin- 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

agined  may  still  be  living  in  unexplored 
regions  of  Africa  or  Asia  and  to  find 
which  expeditions  have  been  occasionally 
sent  out,  only  so  far  to  return  empty- 
handed.  Nor  does  he  find  any  living 
types  which  can  possibly  be  construed  to 
parallel  in  their  condition,  or  actually  to 
be  persisting  remnants  of,  the  most 
ancient  or  most  primitive  types  of  real 
men.  But  he  gets  nearer  to  understand- 
ing the  life  of  man  in  those  days  when 
types  of  men  now  extinct  were  the 
highest  types,  by  looking  at  human  life 
as  exhibited  by  the  lowest  types  now 
living. 

What,  then,  are  some  of  the  specific 
facts  which  have  been  determined  by 
paleontologists  and  anthropologists  con- 
cerning prehistoric  man?  To  try  to  tell 
the  whole  story  is  far  beyond  my  inten- 
tion. We  have  neither  time  nor,  indeed, 
need  for  it  for  the  purposes  of  this  dis- 
cussion. But  the  outstanding  parts  of  it 
can  be  told  in  few  words,  and  these  parts 
are  extremely  pertinent  to  any  general 
23 


HUMAN  LIFE 

consideration  of  human  history;  to  any 
special  consideration  of  human  life  from 
the  view-point  of  the  biologist  they  are 
truly  essential. 

I  must  recall  to  your  minds  that  geol- 
ogists divide  the  eight  hundred  million 
years,  more  or  less,  of  earth  time  into  a 
series  of  successive  ages  characterized  by 
differing  kinds  of  rocks  and  by  different 
floras  and  faunas,  all,  with  the  exception 
of  the  flora  and  fauna  of  the  present  age, 
now  extinct.  It  is  with  only  a  few  of  the 
more  recent  of  these  ages  that  we  need 
now  concern  ourselves  in  our  search  for 
the  geologic  evidence  of  man's  origin. 
Of  course,  recent  is  a  comparative  term. 
It  means,  in  the  mouth  of  the  geologist, 
something  within  anywhere  from  the 
last  few  hundred  thousand  to  the  last 
few  million  years. 

In  the  rocks  of  these  more  recent  ages, 
beginning  with  an  age  called  Lower 
Oligocene,  and  running  on  up  through 
Upper  Oligocene,  Lower,  Mid  and  Upper 
Miocene  and  Pliocene,  have  been  found 
24 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

the  fossil  remains  of  numerous  now 
extinct  anthropoid  apes.  These  have 
been  found  not  only  in  Asia  and  Africa, 
to  which  continents  the  few  living  anthro- 
poids are  now  restricted,  but  also  in 
Europe  which  so  far  has  been  the  source 
of  all  but  two  of  the  most  ancient  human 
relics.  I  speak  of  these  fossils  as  repre- 
senting numerous  anthropoids;  but  nu- 
merous is  also  a  comparative  term;  I  mean 
by  it,  simply,  considerably  more  kinds  of 
anthropoids  than  now  exist;  and  some 
of  these  seem  to  be  of  a  higher  specializa- 
tion than  any  living  anthropoids.  But 
the  rocks  of  none  of  these  ages  have 
revealed  any  fossils  of  indubitable  human 
creatures.  The  one  case  which  may 
possibly  constitute  an  exception  to  this 
statement  is  that  of  the  famous  Pithecan- 
thropus, a  creature  of  which  a  few  bones, 
to  be  specific,  a  skull  cap,  a  femur  and 
two  molar  teeth,  probably  belonging  to  a 
single  individual,  were  found  nearly  thirty 
years  ago  in  Java  by  Dubois.  These 
relics  were  found  in  a  situation  which  if 
25 


HUMAN  LIFE 

it  does  not  allow  the  fossils  to  be  ascribed 
definitively  to  the  Pliocene  Age,  in  its 
very  latest  days  to  be  sure,  at  least  proves 
this  relic  to  be  an  antiquity  as  old  as  the 
very  beginning  of  the  Pleistocene  or 
Glacial  Age.  This  is  the  age  immediately 
succeeding  the  Pliocene  and  is  the  most 
recent  of  the  geologic  series,  unless  the 
period  since  the  last  great  continental 
glaciers  existed  is  given  a  special  name, 
such  as  Recent  (with  a  capital  letter) 
or  Present,  to  distinguish  it  from  that 
period  which  included  the  several  glacial 
and  interglacial  times  now  recognized  as 
comprised  in  the  so-called  Glacial  Age. 
Pithecanthropus  has  been  variously 
hailed  with  joy  as  the  long-sought  missing 
link  or  looked  on  with  scorn  as  an  in- 
dividual degenerate  human  reversion,  or 
looked  on,  with  less  emotion  but  more 
judgment,  as  a  creature  of  very  great 
interest  and  importance  in  the  study  of 
man's  origin  whether  it  be  called  highest 
of  apes  or  lowest  of  men  or  whether  it  be 
excluded  from  the  direct  line  of  human 
26 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

genealogy  and  called  an  offshoot  from 
this  direct  line,  but  one  arising  just  before 
the  line  had  culminated  in  undoubted 
human  kind.  In  a  famous  discussion, 
held  around  the  actual  fossils  brought  by 
their  discoverer  to  the  Zoological  Congress 
at  Leyden  in  1895,  and  participated  in  by 
an  extraordinary  gathering  of  the  most 
eminent  anthropologists  of  the  world, 
five  of  these  experts  maintained  that 
Pithecanthropus  was  an  ape,  seven  that 
it  was  a  man,  and  seven  others  that  it 
was  a  transition  form  between  man  and 
the  anthropoids.  The  discussion  was  one, 
you  see,  primarily  of  precise  classification; 
there  was  practical  agreement  that  this 
creature  of  uppermost  Pliocene  or  lowest 
Pleistocene  time  was  so  much  like  an  ape 
and  at  the  same  time  so  much  like  a  man 
that  it  proved,  if  proof  were  still  needed, 
that  as  far  as  structure,  at  least,  is  con- 
cerned the  anthropoids  and  man  differ 
only  quantitatively  and  not  qualitatively. 
Now  Pithecanthropus  lived  at  least 
from  five  hundred  thousand  to  one  million 
27 


HUMAN  LIFE 

years  ago;  so  that,  if  he  really  represents 
man  in  lowest  human  terms,  we  have  had 
a  human  history  on  this  earth  of  which 
the  period  since  the  earliest  historically 
known  civilizations  of  Egypt  and  Crete  is 
a  very  small  fraction.  But  that  is  not 
necessarily  to  disparage  the  possibility  of 
a  great  deal  of  important  human  history 
occurring  during  that  small  fraction  of 
time.  The  biologist  is  not  so  foolish  as 
to  suggest  that  extent  of  time  alone  is  a 
measure  of  the  importance  of  epochs  in 
human  history.  For  most  of  us  that  last 
one  hundred-thousandth  of  the  period  of 
man's  existence  has  a  hundred  thousand 
times  more  interest  than  all  the  rest.  But 
the  biologist  believes  that  paying  a  little 
attention  to  prehistoric  man  may  make 
the  greater  attention  we  pay  to  historic 
man  more  fruitful  of  a  sounder  under- 
standing of  human  character,  capacity 
and  possibility. 

We   seem   rather  to  have  taken  for 
granted  that   Pithecanthropus   was  the 
first  man  or  obviously  near-man  type. 
28 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

If  this  is  to  be  our  starting  point  we  ask 
the  paleontologist  if  he  has  found  a  more 
or  less  continuous  series  of  human  fossils 
running  forward  from  Pithecanthropus, 
both  as  to  time  and  evolutionary  develop- 
ment, up  to  now.  His  answer  inclines 
to  be,  Yes.  But,  in  truth,  he  has  found 
comparatively  few  actual  fossils  or  relics 
of  human  bodies  and  very  considerable 
gaps  exist  in  the  series  both  as  to 
gradations  in  structure  and  time  periods 
represented.  In  fact,  only  one  of  his 
undoubted  human  relics  goes  back  in 
geologic  time  to  a  period  approaching 
that  represented  by  Pithecanthropus. 

This  oldest  one  is  known  as  the  "  Heidel- 
berg jaw  " — because  it  was  found  in  the 
Elsenz  Valley  not  far  from  Heidelberg — 
and  is  a  lower  jaw  bone  with  almost  all 
of  the  teeth  in  place.  Comparing  it  with 
the  present  human  jaw  it  is  notable  for  its 
unusual  size,  lack  of  protruding  chin,  and 
great  strength  and  thickness  combined 
with  unusual  width  of  the  region  for  the 
attachment  of  the  muscles  used  in  masti- 
29 


HUMAN  LIFE 

cation.  The  teeth  are  large  but  not  out  of 
proportion  to  the  size  of  the  jaw.  The 
jaw  bone  itself  is  more  simian  than 
human,  but  the  teeth  are  more  human 
than  simian.  Particularly  notable  in 
this  respect  are  the  canines  which  are 
not  large  and  long,  as  simian  and  many 
other  mammal  canines  are,  but  small 
and  not  extending  above  the  level  of  the 
other  teeth.  However,  in  their  size, 
heavy  roots,  and  wide  pulp  cavities,  all 
the  teeth  present  characters  which  dis- 
tinguish them  readily  from  human  teeth 
of  today. 

In  addition  to  these  very  earliest  actual 
remains  of  the  bodies  of  man  or  man-ape, 
there  have  been  found,  in  various  local- 
ities in  Portugal,  France,  Belgium,  and 
England,  and  perhaps  elsewhere,  a  con- 
siderable number  of  flaked  flints  in 
positions  which  undeniably  refer  them  to 
a  geologic  time  ranging  back  through 
Pleistocene  into  Pliocene  and  probably 
into  an  even  earlier  age.  These  flaked 
flints,  which  in  higher  or  more  complex 
30 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

stages  of  flaking  are  commonly  known  in 
connection  with  all  of  prehistoric  man's 
later  Pleistocene  life,  and  even  with 
present  human  life  as  exhibited  by  the 
more  primitive  living  peoples,  are,  in 
their  earliest  forms — known  as  eoliths — 
the  subject  of  much  discussion.  It  has 
been  shown  that  a  certain  simple  flaking 
of  flint  stones  can  occur  by  natural 
physical  means  without  the  aid  of  living 
creatures.  But  many  of  these  Pliocene 
or  very  early  Pleistocene  eoliths  show  such 
a  kind  of  flaking,  affording  cutting  edges 
and  grips  for  firm  holding  in  the  hand, 
fitting  them  to  be  very  simple  weapons  or 
tools,  that  many  competent  anthropol- 
ogists insist  that  they  must  have  been 
produced  by  living  creatures  of  sufficient 
wit  and  dexterity  to  make  tools  out  of  the 
material  at  hand  most  available  for  this 
purpose.  Indeed,  we  can  well  imagine 
the  first  human  beings  picking  up  natur- 
ally partly  flaked  flints  and  then  moving 
on  to  better  tools  or  weapons  by  intelli- 
gently and  deliberately  further  flaking 
31 


HUMAN  LIFE 

them  or  flaking  other  flints  found  still  in 
the  form  of  heavy  rounded  pebbles  of 
various  sizes. 

The  great  importance  of  these  eoliths 
to  the  student  of  early  man  is  that  if 
they  are  really  man-made  they  help  sub- 
stantiate the  evidence  of  Pithecanthropus 
and  the  Heidelberg  jaw  as  to  man's 
probable  origin  in  Pliocene  time,  or 
even  earlier.  If  man  did  arise  in  Pliocene 
time  then  his  antiquity  is  carried  back 
by  many  hundred  thousand  years  behind 
that  later  Pleistocene  period  in  which 
we  can  be  certain  of  his  existence  on  the 
basis  of  undoubted  human  fossils. 

This  Pleistocene  or  Glacial  Age  of 
which  our  present  time  may  be  reckoned 
the  latest  part,  was  a  period  of  several 
hundred  thousand  years  characterized 
by  a  succession  of  great  continental 
glaciers  sweeping  down  from  the  north, 
probably  three  on  this  continent  and  four 
in  Europe,  with  separating  interglacial 
times  of  considerably  higher  average  tem- 
perature and  hence  climatic  amelioration. 
32 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

In  the  times  of  the  glaciers,  animals  of  the 
colder  regions — as  the  mammoth,  aurochs 
and  the  like — occurred  all  over  Europe 
even  to  its  present  southern  boundaries, 
while  in  the  warmer  interglacial  times 
animals  characteristic  of  lower  latitudes, 
even  considerably  lower  than  those  of 
present  southern  Europe,  replaced  them. 
It  is  to  this  interesting  age  of  alternating 
cold  and  warm  periods  that  all  the  known 
actual  older  human  fossils  so  far  found 
in  Europe,  with  the  exception  of  the 
probably  older  Heidelberg  jaw,  already 
mentioned,  are  assigned. 

We  have  not  time  even  to  catalogue 
these  relics  of  Pleistocene  man,  let  alone 
refer  to  them  in  any  detail.  All  that  we 
can  do,  and  indeed  all  that  for  our 
present  purpose  we  need  to  do,  is  to  say 
that  skulls  and  teeth  and  arm  and  leg 
bones  and  other  skeletal  parts,  sometimes 
very  fragmentary,  sometimes  gratifyingly 
intact,  together  with  simple  stone  and 
bone  weapons  and  tools  and  primitive 
carvings  and  drawings  on  cavern  walls, 
33 


HUMAN  LIFE 

amounting  in  all  to  a  very  informing 
quantity  of  indubitable  human  remains, 
have  been  discovered  and  exhaustively 
studied,  with  the  result  of  revealing  the 
certain  existence  of  man  in  Europe  all 
through  Pleistocene  Time,  or  at  least 
from  the  first  interglacial  period  of  the 
Pleistocene  Age  up  to  that  comparatively 
modern  time  when  the  archaeologist  and 
later  the  historian  takes  up  the  story  of 
human  kind. 

The  careful  study  of  all  these  Pleisto- 
cene relics  of  early  man's  body  has  en- 
abled anthropologists  to  distinguish  cer- 
tain successive  types  of  prehistoric  man 
differing  in  some  measure  structurally 
and  evolutionally,  so  that  an  older 
type,  like  Neanderthal  man,  distinctly 
shows  stronger  simian  characters  such  as 
smaller  brain  case  and  more  projecting 
orbital  ridges,  less  chin  and  more  jaw, 
more  curving  thigh  bones  and  more 
opposed  great  toe,  than  a  later  type  like 
Cro-Magnon  man.  And  the  exhaustive 
study  of  the  collected  thousands  of  speci- 
34 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

mens  of  early  man's  handiwork  have 
enabled  anthropologists  to  distinguish  a 
series  of  successive  human  cultural  stages 
distinguished  by  marked  differences  in 
the  amount  of  variety  and  degree  of 
elaboration  of  the  weapons  and  tools  and 
ornaments  made  and  used  by  prehistoric 
man  during  Paleolithic,  Neolithic  and  the 
early  metal  ages.  It  is  indeed  remarkable 
how  far  the  students  of  prehistoric  man 
have  been  able  to  go  in  picturing,  with  a 
high  degree  of  presumptive  correctness, 
the  major  features  in  prehistoric  human 
life.  They  even  know  what  other  animals 
he  knew,  both  from  actual  remains  of 
these  animals  found  in  company  with  his 
own  bones  and  from  the  crude  carvings 
and  drawings  on  cave  walls  made  of 
these  animals  by  prehistoric  man  himself. 
There  are  certain  long  limestone  caverns 
in  southern  France  whose  walls  are  veri- 
table picture  galleries  of  Cro-Magnon  pre- 
historic art.  The  students  of  prehistoric 
man  know  also  that  many  things  that 
were  a  part  of  human  life  as  we  first 
35 


HUMAN  LIFE 

know  it  historically  formed  no  part  of 
human  life  in  Pleistocene  time.  Among 
the  many  thousand  recovered  specimens 
of  prehistoric  man's  handiwork,  there  is  a 
singular  paucity  of  variety — a  few  kinds 
are  repeated  over  and  over  again  with 
superficial  changes — which  is  a  fact  that 
reveals  the  limited  resources  and  variety 
of  occupations  of  this  early  human  life. 
But  we  must  not  follow  this  inviting 
lead.  Our  aim  in  this  discussion  was 
simply  to  point  out  those  more  important 
facts  in  the  biologist's  knowledge  which 
bear  on  the  problem  of  man's  emergence 
from  the  gray  mists  of  prehistoric  time 
and  the  welter  of  strange  animal  life  that 
characterized  those  early  days.  And  this 
we  have  done. 


36 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 


THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  PRESENT  MAN 

Now  all  this  consideration  of  man's 
origin  prepares,  even  compels,  the  bio- 
logical student  of  present-day  human  life 
to  recognize  many  characteristics  of  this 
life  as  vestigial,  that  is,  as  carried  over 
from  pre-human  life  and  from  prehistoric 
human  life.  It  compels  him  also  to  face 
the  fact,  that  if  the  human  body  and  its 
capacities  are  recognized  as  derived  by 
the  more  or  less  understood  processes  of 
organic  evolution  from  other  lower  animal 
bodies  and  endowments,  with  no  intro- 
duction of  supernatural  means  to  give 
human  life  qualitatively  different  capaci- 
ties— supernatural  ones,  they  might  be 
called — then  he  must  not  only  expect  to 
find  human  life  influenced  by  inherited 
carry-overs  from  man's  animal  ancestors 
but  he  must  expect  to  find  the  human 
body  and  its  behavior  and  its  fate  subject 
in  greater  or  less  degree  to  the  influence 
37 


HUMAN  LIFE 

of  all  those  general  conditions  and  so- 
called  laws  of  biology  such  as  those  of 
heredity,  variation,  selection,  mutation, 
growth,  the  influence  of  environment, 
etc.,  which  apply  to  all  living  things,  to 
all  substance  and  capacities  of  substance 
organized  as  living  matter. 

But  he  must  be  prepared  to  go  even 
farther.  The  biochemists  and  physicists 
have  made  much  progress  recently  in 
showing  that  many  of  the  long-accepted 
familiar  distinctions  between  living  and 
non-living  matter  must  be  given  up  and 
that  living  matter  is  fundamentally  only 
a  much  more  complex  association  or 
state  of  the  same  substances  that  compose 
other  matter  and  that  therefore  it  is 
largely  controlled  in  its  behavior  just  as 
other  matter  is  controlled,  namely,  by 
physical  and  chemical  conditions  and 
stimuli.  The  Royal  Society  Christmas 
lectures  given  in  1916-1917  before  Lon- 
don popular  audiences  by  Dr.  Arthur 
Keith,  the  famous  English  anatomist, 
physiologist,  and  anthropologist,  have 
38 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

recently  been  published  in  book  form 
under  the  title  "The  Engines  of  the 
Human  Body,"  and  if  you  are  interested 
in  knowing  the  essential  likenesses  be- 
tween your  body  and  a  motorcycle  read 
this  book.  It  at  least  reveals  how  the 
modern  biologist  can  plausibly  describe 
the  body  and  its  functions  in  the  termi- 
nology of  mechanics  and  chemistry.  So 
that  the  biological  student  of  human 
life  must  be  prepared  to  take  constantly 
into  account  the  results  of  the  investiga- 
tions and  the  significance  of  the  claims 
of  the  upholders  of  the  physico-chemical, 
or  mechanistic,  conception  of  life. 

Facing  all  this  you  can  see  how  neces- 
sary it  is  for  the  biological  student  of 
human  life  to  have,  if  he  is  not  to  be 
carried  off  his  feet  at  once  into  the  camp 
of  the  cynical  and  hopeless  complete 
mechanists,  a  wife  and  child  at  home  to 
return  to  from  his  laboratory.  If  I  my- 
self am  not  yet  convinced  that  all  of 
humanism  is  to  be  dumped  together  with 
all  the  rest  of  Nature  into  the  common 
39 


HUMAN  LIFE 

pot  of  chemicalism  it  is  chiefly  owing  to 
my  wife  and  child. 

Not  that  I  cannot  recognize  in  them  the 
presence  of  bodies  composed  of  engines, 
and  of  living  tissues  and  organs  com- 
posed of  substances,  mostly  very  complex, 
but  at  bottom  made  up  of  the  same 
chemical  elements  which  make  up  the 
less  complex  substances  of  non-living 
matter.  Nor  that  I  cannot  perceive  in 
them  the  results  of  the  influences  of  the 
biological  laws  that  I  find  also  in  the 
various  lower  forms  of  life. 

But  I  find  mare  in  them,  so  much  more 
indeed,  that  although  my  scientific  train- 
ing and  knowledge  urge  me  to  look  on 
this  more  as  only  quantitatively  more, 
my /common  sense  and  general  experience, 
let  alone  my  recognition  of  the  limitations 
of  scientific  knowledge,  compel  me  to  see 
in  them  the  manifestations  of  natural 
possibilities  so  far  removed  from  or  in 
advance  of  those  manifestations  as  re- 
vealed in  non-living  matter  or  in  the 
whole  range  of  the  rest  of  the  world 
40 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

of  life,  that,  for  all  practical  purposes, 
these  two  human  beings,  and  hence  all 
others,  must  be  looked  on  as  possessed 
of  at  least  some  qualities  and  capacities 
essentially  different  from  those  found 
anywhere  else  in  Nature. 

But  this  is  not  at  all  to  say  that  I  must 
recognize  anything  supernatural  in  these 
qualities.  They  may  simply  be  such 
different  and  such  extraordinary  natural 
qualities  that  all  the  study  of  the  most 
widely  versed  and  wisest  student  of  all 
the  rest  of  Nature  will  not  enable  him  to 
understand  these  special  human  qualities 
and  capacities  on  the  basis  of  this  study 
alone.  The  scientist  can  be  bigot  just  as 
well  as  the  theologian,  politician,  or  any- 
body else.  And  that  scientist  who  would 
pretend  to  say  that  because  he  has 
studied  Nature  all  his  life  and  has  fa- 
miliarized himself  with  what  has  been 
learned  about  Nature  by  all  the  other 
naturalists,  he  can  dogmatically  declare 
what  are  the  limitations  of  natural  possi- 
bility, is  simply  a  bigot.  Just  as  are  those 
41 


HUMAN  LIFE 

theologians  or  philosophers  who  without 
having  studied  Nature  at  all  pretend  to 
be  able  to  say  the  same  thing.  However 
extraordinary  the  special  qualities  that 
I  cannot  but  see  in  the  human  being,  and 
can  never  see  in  other  kinds  of  living 
beings,  I  am  still  not  necessarily  driven 
to  look  on  man  as  something  out  of  or 
beyond  Nature.  In  fact  I  see  so  much  in 
him  that  is  familiar  elsewhere  in  Nature 
that  I  would  have  quite  as  much  difficulty 
in  explaining  why  this  is  so,  if  he  is  super- 
natural, as  I  now  have  in  trying  to  explain 
all  of  him  in  terms  of  the  Nature  which  is 
revealed  in  studying  physics,  chemistry, 
and  the  natural  history  of  plants  and  the 
lower  animals. 

Altogether,  then,  in  approaching  the 
study  of  human  life  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  biologist  who  is  not  a  bigot,  but 
who  is  after  all  a  biologist  and  not  theo- 
logian or  metaphysician,  we  must  take 
fairly  into  account  all  that  the  study  of 
the  rest  of  Nature  allows  us  to  make  use 
of  in  understanding  certain  aspects  of 
42 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

human  life,  and  yet  must  guard  ourselves 
against  the  assumption  that  because  we 
understand  the  life  of  starfishes  pretty 
well  we  are  sufficiently  equipped  with 
knowledge  to  be  confident  of  explaining 
human  life  in  terms  of  magnified  starfish 
life.  Even  if  I  can  declare  with  almost 
perfect  certainty  what  will  be  the  color 
of  the  eyes  of  the  children  of  two  blue- 
eyed  parents,  and  with  much  confidence 
what  kind  of  mental  equipment  the 
children  of  two  congenitally  feeble-minded 
parents  will  have,  because  I  am  familiar 
with  a  biological  law  discovered  by  a 
naturalist  who  studied  heredity  in  garden 
peas,  and  because  I  have  noted  that  this 
law  applies  equally  well  to  certain  silk- 
worm characters  and,  finally,  to  various 
human  traits,  I  am  in  no  position  to  say 
whether  your  children  will  believe  in  God 
or  not,  be  Republicans  or  Democrats  or 
Bolshevists,  write  poetry,  or  rob  banks, 
or  live  in  settlement  houses.  I  may  be 
able  to  make  a  fair  prognosis  of  the  de- 
gree of  resistance  to  tuberculosis  which 
43 


HUMAN  LIFE 

your  children  will  exhibit  during  their  life 
but  I  can  make  no  least  guess  as  to  their 
probability  of  dying  in  a  future  war  with 
Germany.  I  feel  pretty  certain  about 
what  will  happen  to  the  human  body  after 
death  but  whether  that  is  the  whole  sig- 
nificance of  death  in  relation  to  a  human 
being,  I,  not  being  a  scientific  bigot,  am 
J  not  at  all  certain.  I  am  not  a  spiritist 
but  if  I  claimed  to  be  able  to  say  that 
there  are  and  can  be  no  spirits,  I  should 
be  claiming  to  know  the  whole  order  of 
Nature.  And  that  no  naturalist,  nor  any- 
one else,  does  know. 

All  that  the  naturalist  can  claim  is  that 
he  knows  a  part  of  the  order  of  Nature, 
and  if  some  part  of  human  life  comes 
within  that  known  part  of  the  order 
of  Nature  then  he  insists  that  anyone 
seriously  considering  human  life  must 
take  cognizance  of  this  knowledge  of 
his.  Men  who  in  discussing  the  possi- 
bility of  a  league  of  nations  doing  away 
with  war,  argue  against  such  possibility 
on  the  assumed  premises  that  fighting  is 
44 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

inherent  in  human  nature  and  that  human 
nature  does  not  change,  are  not  taking 
into  account  the  biologist's  certain  knowl- 
edge that  human  nature  does  change. 
The  educator  or  prison  reformer  who 
claims  that  you  can  do  anything  with  any 
man  by  education  and  environment  does 
not  take  into  account  the  biologist's 
knowledge  of  the  unescapable  influence  on 
human  fate  of  inherited  traits.  He 
knows  that  it  is  perfectly  true  that  you 
cannot  put  a  thousand  dollar  education 
into  a  fifty  dollar  boy.  But  well  meaning 
people  keep  trying  to  do  this  all  the  time. 
We  have,  then,  to  face,  in  our  further 
consideration  of  human  life  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  biologist,  two  rather 
sharply  contrasted  things.  One  thing 
is  that  the  biologist  does  have  a  certain 
positive  knowledge  of  some  conditions 
or  factors  that  do  help  to  determine  the 
course  of  human  life.  The  other  thing 
is  that  the  course  of  human  life  is  partly 
determined  by  a  set  of  conditions  which 
are,  so  far  at  least,  quite  outside  the 
45 


HUMAN  LIFE 

v  special  knowledge  of  the  biologist.  He 
can  guess  about  them  and  wonder  about 
them  just  as  other  people  do,  but  he  has 
no  right  to  claim  that  he  knows  about 
them.  If  some  biologists  do  make  this 
claim  it  is  probably  because  they  are 
carried  away  by  the  interesting  sensation 
of  knowing  anything  at  all  about  what 
has  been  so  long  called  "the  mystery  of 
life."  A  famous  biologist  of  the  mechan- 
istic-conception-of-life  school  once  said 
to  me,  as  he  saw  me  find  my  way  to  a 
certain  corner  seat  in  a  restaurant  with 
bench  seats  along  the  walls,  that  the 
reason  why  I  tried  to  find  a  corner  seat 
was  because  I  was  positively  thigmo- 
tropic,  that  is,  that  I  was  irresistibly  im- 
pelled, as  a  sand  flea  is,  to  get  my  body  into 
as  much  contact  as  possible  with  solid  sur- 
roundings. The  fact  is  that  I  had  made, 
several  days  before,  an  appointment  with 
a  friend  to  meet  him  in  that  corner. 

The  human  being  has  such  power  of 
dislocating  his  reactions  to  stimuli  both  as 
regards  time  and  space  that  his  behavior 
46 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

cannot  be  prophesied  by  any  naturalist 
with  ever  so  complete  knowledge  of  the 
reflexes  and  tropisms  exhibited  by  very 
simple  animals.  That  is,  the  inevitable 
and  immediate  responses  of  Paramoecium 
or  houseflies  or  just  hatched  spiderlings 
to  physical  and  chemical  stimuli,  which 
responses,  in  sum,  compose  their  be- 
havior, may  have  their  vestiges  in  man 
and  do  have  certain  parallels,  as  in  the  be- 
havior of  the  internal  organs  and  certain 
external  reflexes.  But  for  the  most  part 
man  turns  towards  or  away  from  light,  or 
finds  a  seat  in  a  corner  or  out  away  from 
the  room  walls,  because  he  is  influenced 
by  factors  very  different  from  simple 
physical  and  chemical  ones,  factors  which 
may  be  of  a  week  ago  or  a  mile  away.  It 
is  these  non-mechanistic  factors  or  con- 
ditions in  human  life,  and  their  results, 
that  constitute  that  part  of  human  life, 
which  is  peculiarly  the  human  part,  that 
the  biologist  must  hesitate  to  be  dogmatic 
about.  Yet  this  part  must  ever  have  a 
seizing  interest  for  him — that  is,  if  he 
47 


HUMAN  LIFE 

is  himself  human  and  not  made  over 
by  too  much  association  with  Paramoe- 
cium  to  be  more  like  his  Protozoan  pet 
than  like  the  rest  of  his  own  species. 
In  our  continuing  consideration  of 
human  life,  therefore,  as  the  biologist 
sees  it,  we  shall  not  hesitate  to  touch  upon 
any  of  the  phenomena  and  problems 
presented  by  this  life  whether  they  be 
clearly  within  the  province  which  the 
biologist  can  pretty  confidently  claim 
as  his,  or  in  that  other  province  which  less 
clearly  belongs  to  him  but  which  he  may 
believe  he  has  at  least  as  much  right  as 
anyone  else  to  venture  into.  He  can  at 
least  peer  about  in  this  other  province  to 
see  if  any  stray  sheep  of  his  own  are  to  be 
found  in  it.  Certainly  in  many  of  the  broad 
problems  of  human  life  arising  in  connec- 
tion with  such  subjects  as  education,  mili- 
tarism, eugenics,  delinquency,  and  others 
usually  regarded  as  chiefly  belonging  to 
the  province  of  humanistics,  he  can  readily 
perceive  biological  aspects.  That  may  be 
his  excuse  for  approaching  them. 
48 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

II 
THE  BIOLOGIST  AND   WAR 

IN  our  preceding  discussion  we  had  a 
fleeting  glance  at  the  evidence  which 
convinces  the  biologist  that  man  is  to  be 
regarded  as  an  evolutionary  derivation 
from  older  and  lower  forms  of  life; 
and  hence  that  in  attempting  to  under- 
stand human  life  he  must  ever  have  an 
eye  open  to  the  influences  on  it  of  the 
persisting  vestiges  of  earlier  kinds  of  life 
which  are  certainly  in  it.  Also,  if  man  is 
to  be  regarded  as  in  and  a  part  of  Nature 
and  not  out  of  or  beyond  it,  we  must 
be  ready  to  recognize  the  part,  however 
large  or  small,  played  in  determining  his 
fate  by  those  biological  factors  or  laws 
which  play  so  dominant  a  part  in  the 
determination  of  the  character  and  fate  of 
the  lower  animals. 

But  man  by  virtue  of  his  social  devel- 
opment and  educational  inheritance  has 
49 


HUMAN  LIFE 

gone  so  far  above  the  lower  animals  in 
his  evolutionary  progress,  has  become  so 
sublimated  a  kind  of  animal,  reveals 
such  mysterious  special  powers  and  attri- 
butes, that  we  must  be  very  careful  not  to 
imagine  that  we  can  understand  his  life 
on  the  sole  basis  of  ever  so  exhaustive  a 
knowledge  of  the  life  of  the  lower  animals. 
But  the  mysteries  in  his  make-up  need 
not  lead  us  to  mysticism  in  our  attempts 
at  their  explanation.  We  would  much 
better  be  agnostic  than  mystic.  At  least 
that  is  the  position  which  the  biologist 
student  of  human  life  must  take  if  he  is  to 
stand  consistently  in  line  with  his  scien- 
tific training  and  experience. 

We  may  assume,  then,  that  we  have 
adopted,  in  our  present  quest  for  knowl- 
edge and  understanding  of  human  life,  a 
certain  attitude,  scientific,  but  open- 
minded  and  not  bigoted,  and  gained  a 
certain  general  orientation.  With  this 
clearing  of  the  atmosphere  we  are  ready 
to  move  forward  in  our  quest.  Too  often 
we  make  our  start  in  studying  human  life 
50 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

by  throwing  out  a  smoke-cloud  in  front 
of  us.  What  we  need  rather  is  as  much 
clearance  of  the  atmosphere  as  possible. 
I  do  believe  science,  rational  science,  not 
bigoted  science,  gives  us  that. 

How  apparently  baffled  we  stand  at 
present  before  the  great  problem  of  war. 
How  confusing  and  contradictory  are  the 
statements  vehemently  made  by  the  pro- 
tagonists of  differing  beliefs  concerning 
it.  There  is  no  consensus  of  men  regard- 
ing it,  not  even  regarding  its  desirability 
or  undesirability,  let  alone  concerning  its 
inevitability  or  the  possibility  of  doing 
away  with  it. 

I  had  during  1915  and  1916  a  peculiar 
opportunity  of  hearing  set  forth  as  ably, 
probably,  as  the  argument  can  be  pre- 
sented, the  reasons  which  lead  some  men 
to  believe  that  war  is  not  only  inevitable 
through  all  human  existence  but  desir- 
able. Part  of  this  argument  came  to  me 
with  special  interest  because  it  was  based 
on  grounds  of  biology  and  biological 
law.  It  came  from  certain  officers  of  the 
51 


HUMAN  LIFE 

German  General  Staff  living  at  German 
Great  Headquarters  in  Occupied  France. 

For  several  months,  as  chief  representa- 
tive of  Mr.  Hoover's  relief  organization 
in  Occupied  France  I  had  to  live,  by  the 
convention  of  agreement  between  us  and 
the  German  government,  at  this  Head- 
quarters, where  all  my  activities  could  be 
under  the  keen  eyes  of  the  German 
General  Staff.  Out  of  this  came  my 
special  opportunity  of  hearing  this  argu- 
ment from  important  sources,  for  in  such 
forced  close  association  we  necessarily 
came  to  a  status  of  more  or  less  frank 
exchange  of  opinions. 

One  of  the  Staff  officers  was  in  civil 
life  a  professional  biologist  of  much  re- 
pute, a  professor  of  zoology  in  one  of  the 
larger  German  universities  whom  I  had 
known  years  before  in  student  days  in 
Leipzig.  Other  officers  of  higher  military 
rank  but  less  academic  training  expressed 
in  more  brutal  terms  the  same  argument, 
but  the  professor-officer's  speeches  were 
the  more  plausible  as  he  understood 
52 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

better  the  language  and  the  theories  of 
biological  evolution  and  was  the  better 
able  to  anticipate  and  guard  against  the 
reasoning  that  might  be  used  by  other 
biologists  to  refute  him.  We  had  many 
warm  debates. 

I  tried  during  the  war  to  tell  the 
American  people,  as  far,  at  least,  as  it 
might  be  reached  through  the  Atlantic 
Monthly,  something  of  the  nature  of  the 
German  arguments  from  biology  why 
there  must  always  be  war,  why  there 
ought  to  be  war,  and  even  why  Germany 
should  win  in  the  war  then  being  waged. 
For  I  believed  that  Americans  should 
know  something  of  this  feeling  and 
attitude  of  the  German  people  or  of  a 
large,  and  certainly  very  influential,  part 
of  them.  I  do  not  wish  to  repeat  here,  too 
much  of  what  I  have  presented  in  the 
Atlantic  articles.  But  we  need,  for  the 
purposes  of  our  present  discussion,  to 
recall  the  essential  features  of  this  claim, 
for  this  argument  from  biology  for  the 
inevitableness  and  even  the  desirability 
53 


HUMAN  LIFE 

of  war  has  been  used,  and  is  used  today, 
by  others  than  Germans. 

The  argument  to  which  I  have  referred 
is  based  on  the  assumption  that  natural 
selection  is  the  all-powerful  factor,  almost 
the  sole  really  important  factor  in  organic 
evolution.  And  that  as  man  as  an 
animal  species  is  subject  to  the  control  of 
the  same  major  evolutionary  factors  as 
control  the  other  animal  kinds,  his  evolu- 
tionary progress  or  fate  is  to  be  decided  on 
the  basis  of  a  rigid,  relentless,  natural 
selection.  It  is  the  argument  from  a 
post-Darwinian  point  of  view  that  goes 
much  beyond  Darwin's  own  concep- 
tions. 

Natural  selection  itself,  as  you  know,  is 
the  outcome  of  a  bitter  and  persistent 
struggle  for  existence,  in  which  struggle 
the  fittest  or  fitter  survive  while  the  less 
fit  become  either  much  modified  or  ex- 
tinguished. This  struggle  has  three  chief 
phases. 

1.  An   inter-species    struggle,   or   the 
lethal  competition  among  different  animal 
54 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

kinds  for  food,  space,  and  opportunity  to 
increase; 

2.  An  intra-species  struggle,  or  lethal 
competition  among  the  individuals  of  a 
single    species,    resultant   on   the   over- 
production due  to  natural  multiplication 
by  geometric  progression;  and 

3.  The  constant  struggle  of  individuals 
and  species  against  the  rigors  of  climate, 
the  danger  of  storm,  flood,  drought,  cold, 
and  heat. 

Now  any  animal  kind  and  its  individ- 
uals may  be  continually  exposed  to  all  of 
these  phases  of  the  struggle  for  existence, 
or,  on  the  other  hand,  any  one  or  more 
of  these  phases  may  be  largely  amelio- 
rated or  even  abolished  for  a  given  species 
and  its  individuals.  This  amelioration 
may  come  about  through  a  happy  acci- 
dent of  time  or  place,  or  because  of  the 
adoption  by  the  species  of  a  habit  or  mode 
of  life  that  continually  protects  it  from 
a  certain  phase  of  the  struggle. 

For  example,  the  voluntary  or  involun- 
tary migration  of  representatives  of  a 
55 


HUMAN  LIFE 

species  hard  pressed  to  exist  in  its  native 
habitat,  may  release  it  from  the  too 
severe  rigors  of  a  destructive  climate, 
or  take  it  beyond  the  habitat  of  its 
most  dangerous  enemies,  or  give  it  the 
needed  space  and  food  for  the  support 
of  a  numerous  progeny.  Thus,  such  a 
single  phenomenon  as  migration  might 
ameliorate  any  one  or  more  of  the  sev- 
eral phases  of  the  struggle  for  exist- 
ence. 

Again,  the  adoption  by  two  widely  dis- 
tinct and  perhaps  originally  antagonistic 
species  of  a  commensal  or  symbiotic 
life,  based  on  the  mutual-aid  principle- 
thousands  of  such  cases  are  familiar  to 
naturalists — would  ameliorate  or  abolish 
the  inter-specific  struggle  between  these 
two  species.  Even  more  effective  in  the 
modification  of  the  influence  due  to  a  bit- 
ter struggle  for  existence,  is  the  adoption 
by  a  species  of  a  social  or  communistic 
mode  of  existence  so  far  as  its  own  in- 
dividuals are  concerned.  This,  of  course, 
would  largely  ameliorate  for  that  species 
56 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

the  intra-specific  phase  of  its  struggle  for 
life. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  this  reliance  by 
animal  kinds  for  success  in  the  world  upon 
a  more  or  less  extreme  adoption  of  the 
mutual-aid  principle,  as  contrasted  with 
the  mutual-fight  principle,  is  much  more 
widely  spread  among  the  lower  animals 
than  familiarly  recognized,  while  in  the 
case  of  man,  it  has  been,  in  connection 
with  high  brain  development  and  the 
acquirement  of  the  power  of  speaking 
and  writing,  the  greatest  single  factor  in 
the  achievement  of  his  proud  biological 
position  as  king  of  living  creatures. 

Altruism — or  mutual  aid,  as  the  biol- 
ogists prefer  to  call  it,  to  escape  the 
implication  of  assuming  too  much  con- 
sciousness in  it — is  just  as  truly  a  funda- 
mental biologic  factor  of  evolution  as  is 
the  cruel,  strictly  self -regarding,  extermi- 
nating kind  of  struggle  for  existence  with 
which  the  Neo-Darwinists  try  to  fill  our 
eyes  and  ears  to  the  exclusion  of  the 
recognition  of  all  other  factors. 
57 


HUMAN  LIFE 

This  mutual  aid,  as  a  biologic  or  natural 
factor,  has  influenced  materially,  as  I 
have  said,  the  mode  of  life,  the  biologic 
success  and  the  character  of  the  evolution 
of  many  kinds  of  lower  animals.  In  their 
case  it  was  not — we  presume — consciously 
chosen  or  consciously  developed.  In  the 
case  of  man,  however,  where  also  mutual 
aid  has  been  a  fundamental  factor  in 
determining  the  mode  of  life  and  the 
success  and  character  of  the  evolution  of 
the  species,  and  where  in  the  beginning 
also  it  may  have  been  entirely  uncon- 
sciously taken  on,  we  face  an  important 
new  thing  in  relation  to  it;  that  is  its  con- 
scious development.  Indeed,  it  is  the  high 
development  of  mutual  aid  plus  a  high 
degree  of  brain  power  plus  the  existence  of 
something  we  call  spirit  or  soul  in  man, 
all  of  these  interacting  on  each  other  to 
the  advantage  of  the  further  development 
of  each,  that  really  distinguishes  man  from 
other  animals  and  makes  him  human. 
This  conscious  development  of  mutual 
aid,  or  altruism,  by  man  demands  some 
58 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

further  consideration  in  connection  with 
our  present  consideration  of  the  problem 
of  war  as  the  biologist  faces  it. 

An  essential  thing  to  keep  in  mind  in 
this  connection  is  that  man  differs  mark- 
edly from  other  animal  kinds  in  having 
two  kinds  of  inheritance  often  confused 
because  of  the  use  of  the  common  term, 
inheritance,  for  both  kinds.  He  has  a  bi- 
ological inheritance — this  is  real  heredity, 
inherent  in  him  and  responsible  for  much 
of  his  physical  and  mental  condition,  and 
for  that  instinctive  behavior,  partly  in- 
dispensable for  the  actual  maintenance 
of  his  life  and  health,  as  in  the  obvious 
cases  of  the  suckling  of  babes  and  the 
winking  of  the  eyelids  and  the  less  no- 
ticed actions  of  his  internal  organs, 
but  partly  no  longer  indispensable,  in 
his  present  stage  of  evolution,  as  in  the 
cases  of  various  brute  performances,  once 
necessary  to  his  self-preservation.  He 
has  also  a  social  inheritance,  not  a  part  of 
his  heredity,  but  playing  a  very  important 
and  conspicuous  role  in  his  life,  especially 
59 


HUMAN  LIFE 

in  his  less  material,  his  higher  life  as  we 
are  accustomed  to  call  it,  in  other  words 
the  part  of  his  life  that  especially  charac- 
terizes and  makes  especially  worth  while 
being  human.  Man  is  not  born  with  this 
social  inheritance  in  him  as  his  biological 
inheritance  is  in  him,  but  with  it  all 
about  him,  ready  for  him  and  certain  to 
be,  in  some  measure,  imposed  on  him. 
He  is  born  into  it  rather  than  with  it  in 
him. 

This  social  inheritance  consists  of  tradi- 
tion, of  recorded  history,  of  precept  and 
example,  in  a  word,  of  education.  It  is 
possible  because  of  mutual  aid  and  speech, 
writing  and  printing.  Other  animals,  es- 
pecially a  few  of  the  higher  ones,  may 
also  enjoy  a  certain  social  inheritance, 
but  man's  social  inheritance  is  so  incom- 
parably greater  and  more  important  in 
determining  the  character  of  his  life,  that 
he  is  in  this  respect  practically  qualita- 
tively different  from  all  other  animals. 

Now  with  all  this  in  his  eyes  the  biol- 
ogist interested  in  the  problem  of  the 
60 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

inevitability  of  war  and  the  desirability 
of  it  sees  the  situation  as  reducible  to 
rather  simple  terms.  If  man  prefers  to 
be  ruled  in  his  relation  to  fighting  and 
war  by  his  biological  inheritance  with 
its  vestigial  carry-overs  from  prehuman 
and  prehistoric  human  days,  and  does 
not  care  to  oppose  to  it  his  power  of 
conscious  development  and  magnification 
of  his  social  inheritance  to  the  end  of 
making  it  victor  over  his  brute  heredity — 
something  that  he  has  successfully  done 
in  relation  to  many  other  things — then 
war  will  persist.  If  he  decides,  as  the 
Germans  seemed  to,  that  the  best  way 
to  develop  the  highest  type  of  man  and 
human  culture  is  to  depend  solely  on 
the  natural  selection  based  on  a  ruth- 
less physical  life-or-death  determining 
struggle  for  existence,  with  a  survival  and 
dominance  of  the  physically  strongest, 
then  war  is  desirable. 

But  if  he  recognizes  that  he  must  take 
into   account   in   his    study   of   human 
development  another  evolution  factor,  not 
61 


HUMAN  LIFE 

less  natural,  and  of  proved  effectiveness, 
which  is  based  on  the  mutual  aid  principle 
instead  of  the  mutual  murder  principle, 
and  one  which  can  be  backed  by  all  the 
force  of  social  inheritance  to  counteract 
certain  opposing  influences  of  biological 
inheritance,  then  war  need  be  to  him 
neither  inevitable  nor  desirable. 

The  protagonists  of  inevitable  war 
declare  that  human  nature  does  not 
change.  The  biologist  declares  that 
human  nature  does  change  both  by 
virtue  of  the  influences  of  strictly 
biological  factors  and  especially,  more 
rapidly,  by  virtue  of  the  influences  of 
social  inheritance.  Human  nature  to- 
day, which  is  certainly  not  the  same  as 
human  nature  in  early  Glacial  Time,  is 
quite  as  much  the  resultant  of  the  work 
of  social  inheritance  factors  as  it  is  of 
factors  of  biological  inheritance.  Human 
nature,  not  just  the  part  that  is  in- 
herited, but  the  whole  of  it,  including 
the  part  that  is  acquired  by  each  gen- 
eration, not  only  changes  but  can  be  made 
62 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

to  change  in  definite  direction  by  educa- 
tion, and  it  can  be  made  to  change  with 
reasonable  rapidity,  a  rapidity  that  seems 
very  rapid  indeed  to  the  biologist  accus- 
tomed to  see  change  mostly  depend  on 
slowly  modified  heredity. 


HUMAN  LIFE 


HEREDITY  AND  HUMAN  PROBLEMS 

THIS  all  too  slight  discussion — and  all 
of  our  discussion  can  be  only  sugges- 
tive, not  exhaustive — of  biological  and 
social  inheritance  in  connection  with  the 
war  problem,  brings  us  naturally  to  a 
consideration  of  certain  other  problems 
of  human  life  in  connection  with  which 
this  distinction  between  biological  and 
social  inheritance,  and  their  conflict  and 
relative  importance,  are  of  special  in- 
terest. 

It  has  been  so  much  the  fashion  lately 
to  emphasize  the  importance  of  a  consid- 
eration of  purely  biological  conditions 
and  laws  in  the  discussions  of  human 
problems — a  wise  fashion,  undoubtedly— 
that  some  too  hasty  and  thoughtless 
readers  and  hearers  of  such  discussions 
may  have  gained  the  impression  that  the 
only  biology  to  consider  in  this  connection 
was  the  biology  which  one  learns  from  a 
64 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

study  of  the  behavior  and  evolution  of 
kinds  of  life  lower  than  human-kind. 
Some  biologists  have  helped  spread  this 
impression. 

But  they  do  wrong  to  do  this.  They  are 
misled  by  their  desire  for  simplist  or 
monist  explanations.  It  is  a  great  econ- 
omy of  thought,  a  good  example  of  the 
Occam's  Razor  principle,  to  push  toward 
a  monist  explanation  of  natural  phenom- 
ena. The  German  war  philosophy,  if  it 
was  an  honest  philosophy  and  with  many 
Germans  it  was  honest,  was  a  monist 
philosophy.  If  natural  selection  can  and 
does  explain  the  evolution  of  plant  and 
animal  life  and  if  man  is  only  a  form, 
rather  unusually  complex,  of  animal  life, 
then  his  evolution,  too,  is  to  depend  on 
this  ruthless  all-powerful  natural  selec- 
tion. 

Well,  even  granting  both  premises — 
and  the  first  one  cannot  be  granted — 
the  conclusion  is  wrong:  man  has  more 
in  his  life  than  is  in  the  life  of  sea-urchins, 
birds,  or  apes.  And  this  more  does 
65 


HUMAN  LIFE 

not  necessarily  mean  something  more 
than  or  different  from  biology — although 
many  of  you  probably  believe  that  it 
does.  The  biology  of  man  is  much  more 
than  and  different  from  the  biology  of 
other  animals  because  of  the  social  in- 
heritance element  in  it — if  for  no  other 
reason. 

The  biologists  who  help  lead  us  to  the 
fascinating  but,  I  think,  false  belief  that 
human  biology  is  to  be  all  understood 
some  time  on  the  basis  of  lower  animal 
biology  alone,  that  all  that  is  in  man 
is  in  lower  animals  although  in  much 
simpler  terms,  have  let  their  zeal  and 
enthusiasm  make  them  overlook  the 
revelations  that  their  wives  and  children, 
their  friends  and  their  own  selves  make 
to  them  every  day.  The  trouble  is  they 
leave  their  philosophic  consideration  of 
human  life  to  their  laboratory  hours. 
They  give  up  being  philosophers  when 
they  get  home  and  become  just  human 
beings,  taking  things  as  they  come  and 
thinking  about  them  in  different  terms. 
66 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

They  think  about  them  in  terms  of  money 
and  trouble  and  pleasure,  and  love  and 
hate,  and  personal  hopes  and  chagrins, 
which  are  peculiarly  human  terms.  That 
is  why  I  repeated  so  many  times  in  my 
first  lecture,  and  repeat  now  again,  that 
we  biologists  must  take  into  account  in  all 
our  looking  at  human  life  the  things 
that  we  see  at  home  as  well  as  the  things 
we  see  in  the  laboratory.  If  we  do  not  we 
overlook  the  greatest  things  in  the  great- 
est problems  of  human  life,  the  things 
that  really  make  human  life  human. 

But  let  us  turn  now  to  one  or  two  more 
of  those  problems  which  especially  involve 
in  their  consideration  this  matter,  in- 
troduced by  our  reference  to  the  war 
problem,  of  the  two  kinds  of  inheritance 
and  the  relations  between  them. 

The  problem  that  I  have  especially 
in  mind  at  this  moment  introduces  con- 
spicuously the  subject  of  human  heredity. 
Is  a  man  what  he  is  because  he  is  born  so  ? 
or  because  he  becomes  so  by  education, 
using  education  in  the  broad  sense  of 
67 


HUMAN  LIFE 

including  all  environment?  Of  course 
this  is  the  old,  old  problem  of  nature  and 
nurture,  already  threshed  out,  one  might 
imagine,  to  its  last  possible  degree.  But 
if  that  were  true  for  yesterday  it  is  not 
true  for  today,  for  the  reason  that  we 
are  daily,  almost,  finding  out  new  things 
about  heredity.  Since  the  beginning  of 
this  century  we  have  learned  more  that 
seems  to  be  fact  about  heredity,  plant 
and  animal  heredity  in  general  and  hu- 
man heredity  in  particular,  than  had  been 
learned  in  all  previous  time. 

In  the  1860's  an  Augustinian  monk 
named  Gregor  Mendel,  living  in  a  clois- 
ter in  Brunn  in  Moravian  Austria  and 
possessed  not  only  of  a  divine  humility 
and  devotion  but  of  the  divine  spark 
of  scientific  curiosity,  or  as  we  call  it  in 
scientific  circles,  research,  carried  on  an 
extensive  lot  of  experiments  in  the  cloister 
garden  in  the  way  of  hybridizing  various 
races  of  garden  peas;  he  was  a  Moravian 
Burbank.  He  read  an  account  of  his 
observations  and  conclusions  before  the 
68 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

local  natural  history  of  Brunn  and  they 
were  published  as  two  brief  papers  in  the 
obscure  proceedings  of  this  obscure  soci- 
ety of  local  naturalists.  And  there  they 
lay  apparently  unnoticed  for  thirty  years. 
Odd  how  an  epoch-making  thing  can  be 
put  into  the  world,  and  lie  unnoticed  for  a 
third  of  a  century! 

In  1900  three  eminent  European  bot- 
anists, one  in  Austria,  one  in  Germany 
and  one  in  Holland,  working  separately 
on  heredity  problems,  each  independently 
and  all  almost  simultaneously,  discovered 
and  made  known  Mendel's  work.  Today 
Mendelian  inheritance,  Mendelism  and 
Mendel  are  words  of  almost  as  much 
significance  to  naturalists  as  Darwinian 
selection,  Darwinism  and  Darwin. 

With  the  work  and  theories  of  Mendel 
and  the  three  botanists,  Tschermak, 
Correns  and  De  Vries,  as  stimulus  and 
basis,  there  has  been  an  energetic  pushing 
on  of  heredity  studies,  with  a  rapid 
gaining  of  many  facts  and  much  under- 
standing until  now  we  are  able  con- 
69 


HUMAN  LIFE 

fidently  to  make  statements  about  the 
heredity  mechanism  and  behavior  really 
startling  in  their  preciseness  and  practical 
importance.  We  can  make  enough  proph- 
ecies about  the  outcome  of  many  cases 
of  mating  to  give  us  sufficient  basis  to 
warrant  us  in  modifying  our  social  in- 
heritance in  directions  to  increase  ad- 
vantages or  decrease  disadvantages  de- 
rived from  biological  inheritance. 

Before  Mendel  and  the  post-Mendel- 
ians,  about  the  only  so-called  law  of 
heredity  that  had  been  formulated  was 
Galton's  generalization  to  the  effect  that 
an  individual  receives  one-half  of  his 
inheritance  from  his  two  parents,  one- 
fourth  from  his  four  grandparents,  one- 
eighth  from  his  eight  great  grandparents, 
one-sixteenth  from  his  sixteen  great, 
great  grandparents  and  so  on  by  de- 
creasing fractions  back  to  the  beginning 
of  ancestors,  the  total  of  these  fractions 
equalling  1,  or  the  total  biological  inheri- 
tance of  the  individual.  Very  interesting, 
but  not  very  specific  as  to  just  what 
70 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

particular  traits,  physical  and  mental — 
and  Galton  was  almost  the  first  to  include 
mental  traits  in  heredity  on  the  same 
basis  as  physical  traits — interesting,  I 
say,  but  not  very  specific  as  to  just  what 
particular  traits  one  is  going  to  get  in  the 
respective  J^,  J4,  Y&  etc.,  from  the 
respective  parents,  grandparents,  great 
grand-parents,  et  al.  And  that  is  really 
what  we  burn  to  know. 

I  remember  a  red-headed  boy  among 
my  early  companions  whose  parents  were 
brown-haired,  and  this  boy  used  to  won- 
der why  he  was  red-headed.  By  constant 
reminders  we  never  let  him  cease  wonder- 
ing. Finally  his  parents  discovered  that 
back  in  the  ancestral  line  there  had 
existed  another  shock  of  flame.  And 
parents  and  red-haired  son  were  satisfied 
to  say  that  he  was  a  "throw-back"  to 
great  grandfather  William;  red  hair  was  a 
part  of  the  one-eighth  of  his  inheritance 
that  the  boy  got  from  his  great  grand- 
parents. 

Mendelism  makes  no  such  broad  gen- 
71 


HUMAN  LIFE 

eralizations  as  Gallon's  but  it  makes 
much  more  precise  ones.  It  does  not 
treat  of  halves  or  quarters  or  eighths  of 
one's  whole  inheritance  but  of  the  inheri- 
tance of  specific  characters,  as  hair-form, 
eye-color,  susceptibility  or  resistance  to 
particular  disease,  and  feeble-mindedness. 
I  am  talking  of  human  traits  and  human 
heredity  now.  Among  plants  it  treats 
of  leaf  shape,  flower  pattern,  height  of 
stem,  and  other  characters.  Among 
silkworms  it  treats  of  larval  coloration 
and  pattern,  color  of  cocoon,  number  of 
generations  a  year,  and  others.  And  so 
on.  I  might  make  a  long  list  of  specific 
traits,  structural  and  physiological,  in  a 
long  list  of  plant  and  animal  species,  and  a 
rather  impressive  list  for  the  human  spe- 
cies, about  the  inheritance  of  which  quite 
specific  and  precise  things  can  be  affirmed 
as  a  result  of  the  intensive  study  of 
heredity  that  has  been  done  in  the  last 
twenty  years. 

All  of  these  things  are  interesting  and 
some  are  both   interesting  and   useful. 
72 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

You  can  see  the  utility  to  the  breeder  of 
silkworms  if  I  am  able  to  say  to  him  that 
if  he  will  cross  a  silkworm  moth  of  a 
certain  race  which  spins  yellow  silk  with 
one  from  a  certain  white-silk  spinning 
race — and  it  makes  no  difference  whether 
the  male  or  the  female  be  either  of  the 
white  or  the  yellow  silk  race;  there  is  no 
factor  of  sex-potency  in  the  outcome — he 
will  get  a  progeny  of  silkworms  all  of 
which  spin  yellow  cocoons,  but  that  if  for 
a  second  generation  he  mates  two  of  these 
yellow-spinners  together  he  will  get  a 
brood  of  which  three-fourths  will  spin 
yellow  cocoons  and  one-fourth  white 
cocoons,  while  if  for  a  third  generation  he 
mates  two  of  these  white  spinners  together 
he  will  get  a  brood  all  of  which  will  spin 
white,  and  only  white  cocoons,  while  if  he 
mates  all  of  the  yellow  spinners  inside 
their  group  he  will  get  from  one-third  of 
these  matings  broods  which  spin  nothing 
but  yellow  cocoons  but  from  two-thirds 
of  them  broods  which  spin  both  yellow 
and  white  cocoons  in  the  precise  propor- 
73 


HUMAN  LIFE 

tion  of  three-fourths  spinning  yellow  and 
one-fourth  spinning  white — I  say  if  I 
can  tell  a  silk  grower  these  things  as 
facts  which  he  can  rely  on — and  I  can 
actually  do  this  as  a  result  of  my  own 
experiments  and  observations — he  will 
find  them  not  only  interesting  but  useful. 
Think  what  such  knowledge  of  heredity 
means  to  the  plant  and  animal  breeder. 
And  then  think  of  what  similar  knowledge 
concerning  the  inheritance  of  human 
traits  may  mean  in  human  life. 

The  example  I  have  given  of  the  hered- 
ity behavior  of  a  certain  silkworm  charac- 
teristic is  a  case  of  typical  Mendelian 
inheritance.  The  inheritance  of  blue  or 
brown  eyes  in  men  follows  the  same 
course;  so  does  six  and  five-fingeredness; 
so  does  a  certain  form  of  color  blindness 
paired  with  color  visualness;  so  does 
Huntington's  chorea  paired  with  freedom 
from  this  fatal  infirmity;  so  does,  although 
in  less  perfect  form,  feeble-mindedness 
paired  with  full-mindedness.  Mendelian 
inheritance  is  the  order  or  behavior  of  the 
74 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

heredity  of  specific  unit  characters.  Not 
all  traits  are  inherited  according  to  the 
Mendelian  order,  but  many  are.  This 
order  can  be  found  out  if  it  exists  and 
then  predicted. 

It  must  be  found  out  by  experiment 
(in  lower  animals  and  plants)  or  observa- 
tion (in  human  beings)  for  each  specific 
trait  in  each  species  of  plant  and  animal 
and  for  man.  The  order  cannot  be 
predicted  for  another  species  on  the 
basis  of  knowledge  in  one  species;  nor  for 
man  on  a  basis  of  knowledge  in  lower 
animals.  The  inheritance  of  each  trait  is 
independent  of  the  inheritance  of  any 
other  trait,  with  the  exception  of  occa- 
sional yoked  or  grouped  traits  which 
behave  as  a  single  unit.  It  is  unit  inheri- 
tance where  single  characteristics  are  the 
units,  not  fractional  inheritance  where  all 
the  traits  or  the  whole  individual  is  the 
unit.  It  will  take  a  long  time  to  work  out 
the  order  of  heredity  for  all  the  Mendeliz- 
ing  traits,  physical  and  mental,  which 
the  human  species  possesses,  but  it  can  be 
75 


HUMAN  LIFE 

done;  and  then  we  can  bring  to  bear  the 
power  of  our  social  inheritance  to  make 
human  life  rapidly  better  by  encouraging 
the  good  and  discouraging  the  bad  in 
biological  inheritance. 

But  we  do  not  have  to  wait  until  we 
know  the  order  of  inheritance  for  all  our 
traits  before  we  can  begin  to  use  wisely 
this  new  knowledge  of  heredity  that 
began  with  the  revelations  of  the  Augus- 
tinian  monk  Mendel  about  the  inheri- 
tance of  stem  length  and  pod  shape  and 
seed  coat  of  garden  peas.  We  can  begin 
on  a  basis  of  the  knowledge  of  the  heredity 
behavior  of  a  single  trait.  Let  me  give 
you  an  example. 

For  a  long  time  the  characters  consid- 
ered in  studies  of  heredity  were  exclu- 
sively physical  ones.  Just  as  in  the 
beginning  days  of  anatomical  study  man's 
body  was  considered  too  sacred  to  be 
submitted  to  dissection,  so  in  the  begin- 
ning days  of  heredity  study  man's  mental 
traits  were  considered  too  sacred  for 
scientific  analysis.  It  was  Galton,  as  I 
76 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

have  already  said,  who  first,  in  any  con- 
spicuous way,  included  mentality  along 
with  physical  characters,  as  subject  of 
studies  in  biological  inheritance.  In- 
deed he  gave  more  attention  to  the  in- 
heritance of  mental  capacity  than  to  that 
of  physical  traits.  His  first  important 
book  on  inheritance  is  called  "Hered- 
itary Genius."  It  is  interesting  to  note, 
in  passing,  that  Galton's  studies  and  their 
publication  were  made  after  Mendel  had 
done  his  work,  but  before  Mendel's  work 
had  been  discovered  and  made  known  to 
the  world. 

Ever  since  Galton,  students  of  human 
heredity  have  paid  attention  to  the  in- 
heritance of  mental  traits  and  general 
mental  capacity.  It  is  a  fascinating  thing 
to  trace  the  descent  of  genius  or  great 
talent  through  the  succeeding  generations 
of  a  family.  The  Bach  family  contributed 
fifty  notable  musicians  to  the  world  in 
five  generations.  The  death  of  the 
astronomer  K.  H.  Struve  a  few  months 
ago  called  attention  to  the  fact  that  his 
77 


HUMAN  LIFE 

father  and  grandfather,  Otto  and  F.  G. 
W.  Struve,  respectively,  were  also  em- 
inent astronomers,  all  three  having  been 
gold  medalists  of  the  Royal  Astronomical 
Society.  Three  sons  of  Charles  Darwin 
have  shown  mental  capacity  above  the 
average. 

But  if  unusual  mental  capacity  is 
heritable  so  also  is  unusual  mental  in- 
capacity, and  because  marked  incapacity 
becomes  a  social  danger  or,  at  least, 
burden,  much  special  study  has  been 
given  it  in  recent  years.  The  matter 
interests  not  only  students  of  heredity, 
but  sociologists,  educators,  and  criminol- 
ogists.  For  mental  incapacity  or  in- 
sufficiency revealed  in  children  as  marked 
backwardness  and  feeble-mindedness  per- 
sists in  adults  as  feeble-mindedness  and 
imbecility,  and  poses  a  series  of  grave 
problems  concerning  the  social  relations 
of  these  unfortunates. 

One  of  the  most  interesting  practical 
outcomes  of  this  intensive  study  of  mental 
sub-normalcy  has  been  the  development 
78 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

of  ingenious  intelligence  tests,  with  point 
scales,  by  which  a  definite  rating  for 
intelligence  can  be  determined  for  any 
individual.  These  tests  were  first  devised 
for  children  but  modifications  of  them 
have  been  used  for  adults.  An  extensive 
use  of  these  tests,  with  highly  successful 
results,  was  made  during  the  war  for 
rating  American  soldiers  and  officers. 
Indeed  the  success  of  this  method  of 
testing  and  expressing  intelligence  has 
been  one  of  the  most  brilliant  and  useful 
modern  contributions  of  psychology  to 
practical  life. 

An  interesting  and  useful  feature  in 
connection  with  the  tests  is  the  expression 
of  their  results  in  terms  of  mental  age 
which  may  be  contrasted  at  once  with  the 
actual  age  of  the  individuals  tested,  so 
that  the  degree  of  mental  retardation  or 
advancement  is  made  manifest  in  readily 
understandable  terms.  Thus  a  child  of 
12  years  of  age  may  be  found  to  have  a 
mental  age  of  but  8  years,  meaning  that 
the  intelligence  of  this  12  year  old  child 
79 


HUMAN  LIFE 

is  only  on  a  par  with  the  intelligence 
of  an  average  normal  child  of  eight.  In 
addition,  as  the  mental  age  indicates 
only  the  general  level  to  which  the 
intelligence  of  the  individual  has  devel- 
oped at  the  time  the  tests  are  applied,  a 
measure  of  the  actual  rate  of  mental 
development  of  the  subject,  called  the 
"intelligence  quotient,"  is  used.  This 
intelligence  quotient  is  the  percentage 
ratio  between  the  mental  and  chronologi- 
cal age  of  the  subject.  Repeated  tests 
of  the  same  children  at  intervals  of  one  to 
four  years  have  indicated  that  the  in- 
telligence quotient  of  a  given  child  re- 
mains practically  constant  between  the 
ages  of  ten  and  sixteen  years.  By  reason 
of  its  relative  stability,  therefore,  the 
intelligence  quotient  becomes  a  reliable 
and  useful  index  of  intelligence.  Once 
determined,  it  is  possible  to  predict  by  it, 
within  reasonable  limits,  the  probable 
level  to  which  a  given  individual's  in- 
telligence will  develop.  From  a  rather 
wide  experience  of  these  specific  ratings 
80 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

of  mental  age  and  intelligence  quotient, 
certain  general  categories  of  mental  ca- 
pacity or  incapacity  have  been  established 
and  are  now  commonly  used  by  psychol- 
ogists. At  bottom  is  the  category  feeble- 
minded, then,  in  ascending  order,  border- 
line, dull-normal,  average-normal  and 
superior. 

Much  special  study  has  been  given 
feeble-mindedness  by  students  of  heredity 
in  the  last  decade  and  it  has  been  fairly 
satisfactorily  proved  that  this  mental 
condition  is  not  only  an  inherited  con- 
dition, but  that  it  may  be  looked  on  as  a 
unit  human  trait  following  the  general 
Mendelian  order  as  regards  its  mode  of 
inheritance.  If  this  is  really  so — and  it  is 
hardly  any  longer  open  to  doubt — it  has 
obviously  a  most  important  significance 
in  connection  with  the  whole  problem 
of  education.  It  must  make  us  face 
squarely  the  situation  that  there  are 
limits  to  the  educability  of  certain  in- 
dividuals and  that  we  should  somewhere 
call  a  halt  on  the  vain  efforts  we  are 
81 


HUMAN  LIFE 

making  to  put  the  same  kind  and 
amount  of  education  into  all  kinds  of 
pupils. 

This  fact  of  the  heritability  of  feeble- 
mindedness has  also  an  important  sig- 
nificance in  connection  with  a  particular 
social  problem,  that  of  juvenile  delin- 
quency, for  it  has  been  proved  beyond 
much  doubt  by  the  studies  of  Goddard, 
Davenport,  Kuhlmann,  Williams  and 
others  that  feeble-mindedness  and  delin- 
quency are  all  too  often  closely  linked  in 
terms  of  cause  and  effect.  Dr.  Williams 
has  recently  published  the  detailed  re- 
sults of  an  exhaustive  study  made  by  him 
of  470  delinquent  boys  (ages  6  to  22  years) 
in  California.  His  monograph  is  the 
record  of  an  admirable  piece  of  investiga- 
tion conducted  in  an  unprejudiced  and 
rigorously  scientific  manner,  with  care 
to  consider  all  the  details  and  possible 
influence  of  environment  as  well  as  of 
heredity  on  the  subjects  of  his  study. 
Its  results  can  be  expressed  in  few  words, 
and  they  are  results  which  are  confirmed 
82 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

by  a  large  amount  of  similar  investigation, 
especially  those  of  Goddard. 

Williams  finds  that  about  one-third 
of  his  juvenile  delinquents  are  feeble- 
minded and  that  nearly  one-half  are 
border  line  or  dull-normal  in  mental 
rating,  while  only  about  one-fifth  are 
average-normal  or  superior.  If  the  per- 
centage of  the  various  mental  rating 
classes  in  two  groups  of  California  boys 
of  similar  ages  are  compared,  one  group 
being  Williams'  470  delinquents  and  the 
other  a  group  of  one  thousand  boys  taken 
at  random  from  all  classes  of  the  popula- 
tion, we  note  the  following  suggestive 
facts:  Superior  rating,  delinquent  group, 
3%,  miscellaneous  group,  20%;  average- 
normal  rating,  delinquent  group,  19%, 
miscellaneous,  60%;  dull-normal  rating, 
delinquent,  21%,  miscellaneous,  10%; 
border-line  rating,  delinquent,  27%,  mis- 
cellaneous, 8%;  feeble-minded,  delin- 
quent, 30%,  miscellaneous,  2%.  The 
association  of  feeble-mindedness  with  ju- 
venile delinquency  is  positive. 
83 


HUMAN  LIFE 

But  not  all  delinquency  is  due  to  feeble- 
mindedness. In  Williams'  group  of  delin- 
quent boys,  19%  are  rated  as  of  average 
normal  intelligence  and  3%  of  superior 
intelligence.  Altogether,  in  Dr.  Williams' 
judgment,  about  one-third  of  California 
juvenile  delinquency,  which  is  a  first  step 
toward  confirmed  adult  criminality,  is 
due  to  hereditary  mental  deficiency,  an- 
other third  to  other  undesirable  inherited 
traits  and  the  final  third  to  unfortunate 
environmental  conditions.  There  are, 
then,  two  kinds  of  causes  of  juvenile 
delinquency,  and  two  kinds  of  remedies 
are  required  to  combat  these  causes;  one  a 
remedy  of  better  environment,  the  other  a 
remedy  of  being  better  born.  Which  is  a 
natural  introduction  to  a  few  words  on  the 
general  subject  of  eugenics. 

Poor  word  eugenics,  and  such  a  good 
word,  too.  But  the  comic  papers  and 
comic  stage  and  the  sadly  comic  capers  of 
the  all  too  serious  cranks  and  all  too  un- 
wise and  too  extreme  would-be  friends 
have  made  this  good  word  almost  im- 
84 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

possible;  much  more,  they  have  seriously 
hurt  the  repute  of  the  really  good  idea  it 
stands  for.  To  be  well  born  is  certainly  an 
excellent  thing  to  achieve;  anyone  con- 
templating being  born  would  like  to 
arrange  it.  Racial  well-being  is  certainly 
an  advantageous  thing  for  a  race;  any 
people  would  like  to  possess  it.  Well, 
eugenics  means  these  things,  not  surgi- 
cal sterilization  of  men  or  women,  state 
controlled  breeding  of  children,  abolish- 
ment of  love,  or  any  or  all  of  these  or  the 
other  special  exaggerations  or  ugly  fancies 
which  have  been  made  synonyms  of 
eugenics  by  humorists,  scoffers,  or  cranks.  / 
Eugenics  bases  its  claim  as  a  subject  V 
for  reasonable  and  sympathetic  considera- 
tion on  two  grounds:  first,  the  acknowl- 
edged power  or  influence  of  heredity  for 
good  or  ill  in  helping  to  determine  hu- 
man fate;  and,  second,  the  acknowledged 
power  which  we  have  in  education  for 
encouraging  good  and  discouraging  bad 
human  heredity.  The  great  recent  in- 
crease in  extent  and  precision  of  our 
85 


HUMAN  LIFE 

knowledge  of  heredity  adds  materially  to 
the  possibility  of  making  eugenics  a  sub- 
ject entirely  worth  serious  and  active  con- 
sideration. The  more  we  know  of  the 
mechanism,  the  order  and  the  results  of 
biological  inheritance,  the  more  we  can 
develop  and  make  use  of  a  social  inheri- 
tance which  shall  help  to  make  individuals 
and  peoples  better  born. 

Guyer  in  his  excellent  little  book,  en- 
titled "Being  Well-Born,"  gives  a  striking 
example  of  what  bad  and  good  inheritance 
can  mean  by  giving  the  facts  in  the  case 
of  two  lines  of  descent;  one,  which  we 
may  call  Line  A,  came  from  a  normal 
father  mated  to  a  feeble-minded  mother 
and  the  other,  Line  B,  from  the  same 
normal  father  mated  to  a  normal  mother. 
In  five  generations  of  Line  A,  480  direct 
descendants  included  143  known  to  be 
feeble-minded,  291  of  unknown  or  doubt- 
ful mentality,  36  illegitimate,  33  sexually 
immoral,  24  confirmed  alcoholics,  3  epi- 
leptics, 3  criminals,  8  keepers  of  dis- 
reputable houses,  82  dead  as  infants, 
86 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

and  only  46  known  to  be  of  normal 
mentality  and  character.  In  five  genera- 
tions of  Line  B,  496  descendants  were  all, 
with  but  one  exception,  which  was  a  case 
of  religious  mania,  of  normal  mentality. 
But  two  were  alcoholics  and  none  was 
epileptic  or  criminal.  Only  15  children 
died  in  infancy.  Practically  all  the  mem- 
bers of  this  line  were  good  representative 
citizens  including  judges,  lawyers,  doctors, 
educators,  business  men,  etc. 

The  notorious  Jukes,  Kallikak,  Nam, 
Piney,  and  Zero  families,  the  Tribe  of 
Ishmael,  the  Hill  Folk,  and  the  descen- 
dants of  Margaret,  Mother  of  Criminals, 
which  have  been  studied  by  various 
students  of  heredity,  show  conclusively 
what  bad  heredity  can  do  for  individuals 
and  society.  It  is  estimated  that  the 
Jukes  family  alone,  with  its  300  profes- 
sional paupers,  440  physical  wrecks  from 
debauchery,  50  prostitutes,  60  habitual 
thieves,  7  murderers,  and  130  other 
convicts  out  of  a  total  of  1200  identi- 
fied descendants,  has  cost  the  state  of 
87 


HUMAN  LIFE 

New  York  over  a  million  dollars  for  the 
care  of  its  criminal,  defective  and  immoral 
members.  We  may  deem  it  fortunate  for 
us,  and  for  them,  that  300  of  its  known 
progeny  died  in  infancy. 

To  be  a  eugenist  does  not  necessarily 
mean  to  be  a  crank.  It  means  to  be  a 
person  interested  in  such  tangible  revela- 
tions as  I  have  just  referred  to  of  the 
wholesale  misery  and  social  injury  possi- 
ble from  bad  heredity,  and  willing  to 
approve  and  actively  support  whatever 
can  be  done  wisely  by  education  and  legal 
provision  to  prevent  repetition  of  this 
sort  of  thing.  It  means  to  be  a  person 
willing  to  use  common  sense,  scientific 
knowledge,  and  prevision  for  the  good  of 
his  own  family,  society,  and  the  race. 
Karl  Pearson  has  pointed  out  that  one- 
half  of  England's  new  generation  is  being 
produced  by  the  most  hereditarily  un- 
fortunate one-fourth  of  England's  popula- 
tion. Bad  heredity  is  outstripping  good 
heredity  in  England.  No  amount  of 
after  education  or  good  environment  can 
88 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

make  good  this  fundamental  bad  start  in 
life.  A  growing  national  recognition  of 
this  alarming  situation  is  perhaps  the 
reason  that  eugencics  has  been  less 
laughed  at  in  England  than  elsewhere. 


89 


HUMAN  LIFE 


THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  THE  PUBLIC 

Now  these  matters  of  war  and  juvenile 
delinquency  and  racial  well-being  which 
I  have  referred  to  are  all  important 
problems  in  human  life  and  to  all  of  them 
the  biologist  can  admittedly  make  some 
enlightening  contribution.  They  are  but 
three  examples  of  the  many  problems  of 
human  life  with  obvious  and  fundamen- 
tal biological  aspects.  But  how  little  has 
the  world,  although  intensely  interested 
in  these  problems  and  anxiously  trying 
to  solve  them,  taken  any  advantage  of 
the  special  knowledge  offered  by  the 
biologist  in  connection  with  them.  And 
this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  it  has  been 
in  recent  years  quite  the  fashion  to  invite 
the  biologist  to  talk  about  such  problems 
and  even  to  listen  to  him  with  a  tolerant 
interest.  But  why  the  fashion  of  listening 
to  his  advice  and  at  the  same  time  the 
fashion  of  not  acting  on  it?  Well,  it  is  not 
90 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

all  the  fault  of  the  public:  it  is  partly  the 
fault  of  the  biologist. 

In  the  first  place,  the  biologist  too  usu- 
ally finds  much  difficulty  in  making  him- 
self understood  by  the  public.  He  seems 
unable  to  escape  from  the  use  of  a  ter- 
minology that  is  included  only  in  the 
larger  dictionaries — and  these  dictionaries 
are  at  home  while  the  public  is  in  the 
lecture  hall.  Hence  the  people  who  listen 
to  him  go  away  confused  and  incapable 
of  doing  what  the  biologist  thinks  he 
has  suggested  to  them  to  do.  There  are 
hundreds  of  interesting  and  pertinent  facts 
of  biology  that  are  today  waiting  intel- 
ligible telling  in  order  to  be  made  use  of! 

In  the  second  place  the  biologist  appar- 
ently has  difficulty  in  estimating  the 
varying  degrees  of  practicalness  of  his 
knowledge.  His  facts  and  his  recom- 
mendations run  all  the  gamut  from 
tangible  practicability  to  most  academic 
impracticability.  Take  the  very  examples 
I  have  used  this  evening!  If  the  biologist 
has  nothing  more  to  contribute  to  the 
91 


HUMAN  LIFE 

discussion  of  the  tremendously  important 
and  pressing  problem  of  war  than  the 
assurance  that  human  evolution  will  carry 
us  beyond  war  in  another  geologic  epoch 
or  two,  he  may  be  listened  to  with  tolerant 
interest  but  he  will  start  nothing  to  help 
put  an  end  to  war.  Of  .course  I  think  that 
he  really  has  more  to  offer.  I  have  even 
tried  to  indicate  what  it  is  that  he  can 
suggest,  namely,  to  fight  the  false  notion 
that  human  evolution  must  be  left  to 
natural  selection,  and  that  war  produces 
natural  selection — as  a  matter  of  fact  war 
produces  artificial  selection  more  than 
natural  selection  and  a  bad  or  reversed 
artificial  selection  at  that.  He  can  also 
encourage  the  right  notion  that  biological 
inheritance,  especially  where  already  ves- 
tigial, can  be  largely  offset  by  social 
inheritance. 

In  fact,  it  is  social  evolution,  not  bio- 
logical evolution,  that  we  must  chiefly 
look  to  for  future  human  progress.  Most 
anthropologists  agree  that  the  major 
difference  between  present  man  and  prim- 
92 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

itive  man — not  man  of  the  Ice  Age  but 
primitive  man  of  late  prehistoric  and 
historic  times — lies  in  the  possession  by 
present  man  of  methods  and  technic 
based  on  scientific  knowledge  not  pos- 
sessed by  primitive  man.  And  modern 
man  has  gained  over  primitive  man  with 
ever  increased  acceleration.  His  move- 
ment of  advance  has  been  like  that  of  a 
snowball  rolling  faster  as  it  gets  bigger. 
Many  biologists  believe  that  man  is 
already  so  specialized  an  end  product  of 
his  evolutionary  line,  that  as  regards 
physical  change  and  actual  mental  ca- 
pacity he  has  reached  the  standing-still 
stage.  Certainly  man  today  as  individual 
is  not  to  be  regarded  as  superior  to  man 
of  early  historic  times,  of  the  times  of 
Greek  greatness  or  probably  even  of  the 
times  of  early  Egypt  and  Asia-Minor. 

In  connection  with  the  matter  of 
juvenile  delinquency  and  racial  well- 
being  the  biologist's  contribution  of  facts 
and  suggestions  are  of  tangible  prac- 
ticability. The  biologist  says  that  the 
93 


HUMAN  LIFE 

normal  man  who  married  the  feeble- 
minded woman  and  started  a  line  of 
descendants  of  whom  four  out  of  five  were 
socially  incompetent  and  hence  burdens 
and  dangers  to  society,  and  then  married 
a  normal  woman  and  started  another 
line  of  descendants  all  socially  competent, 
should  have  been  prevented  from  making 
the  first  mating.  Don't  call  this  eugenics ; 
call  it  an  application  of  scientific  knowl- 
edge and  common  sense.  Think  of  it  as 
just  as  important  and  just  as  possible  as 
the  enforced  isolation  of  a  victim  of  in- 
fectious disease,  or  of  homicidal  mania. 
But  not  all  the  problems  of  human  life 
in  the  discussion  of  which  the  biologist 
ventures  to  take  part  exhibit  so  clearly 
as  the  examples  thus  far  referred  to,  their 
biological  aspects.  The  approach  of  the 
biologist  to  these  other  problems,  even 
his  right  to  approach  them,  becomes 
more  debatable — but  for  that  very  rea- 
son, perhaps,  more  interesting.  Can  the 
biologist  with  his  methods  of  analysis 
and  his  knowledge  of  other  kinds  of  life 
94 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

than  human  life,  make  any,  even  least, 
contribution  to  that  which  most  of  us 
demand  first  from  existence,  namely, 
personal  happiness?  Can  he  show  us 
wiser  ways  of  living?  He  can  unques- 
tionably show  us  safer  ways;  he  can  help 
guide  us  in  our  constant  great  gamble  of 
betting  our  lives  on  what  we  know.  And 
presumably  that  alone  is  quite  worth  our 
calling  on  him  to  give  us  the  benefit  of 
his  special  knowledge,  and  his  reasoned 
recommendations.  But  merely  being 
safer  amid  danger,  merely  continuing  to 
live  and  living  longer,  is  not  what  many, 
very  many  of  us,  are  chiefly  concerned 
with.  We  want  continuing  to  live  to 
mean  something  continually  larger.  We 
yearn  for  encouragement  of  our  hopes,  for 
inspiration  to  struggle  on  to  achieve  what 
we  can  hardly  define  but  clearly  feel  intent 
on.  Has  the  biologist  anything  helpful  to 
suggest  about  this?  Or  will  listening  to 
him  mean  more  pessimism,  hopelessness, 
fatalism?  If  so  perhaps  we  would  prefer 
to  be  blindly  hopeful,  ignorantly  happy. 
95 


HUMAN  LIFE 


m 

THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  EVERYDAY 
LIFE 

IN  our  preceding  discussions  we  became 
acquainted  with  certain  facts  which  con- 
tribute in  some  degree  to  help  solve  the 
problem  of  human  origin  and  the  place  in 
Nature  of  humankind.  And  we  noted 
certain  other  facts  which  help  to  reveal 
the  kind  and  extent  of  the  influence  on 
human  behavior  of  some  of  those  biolog- 
ical factors  whose  influence  on  the  life  of 
other  animals  is  so  obvious  to  the  student 
of  general  biology. 

In  recognizing  these  facts  we  have  at 
the  same  time  recognized  the  necessity  of 
taking  account,  in  any  candid  study  of 
human  life,  of  the  special  significance  of 
these  facts,  which  is,  simply,  that  the 
human  species,  however  different  it  may 
seem  or  actually  be  from  other  forms  of 
life,  is  not  so  different  as  to  be  something 
96 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

outside  of  Nature,  unrelated  to  other 
kinds  of  creatures,  and  hence  to  be 
studied  quite  apart  from  other  forms  of 
life.  Indeed,  in  face  of  the  many  facts 
that  have  been  revealed  concerning  man's 
relation  to  other  extinct  and  living  crea- 
tures and  concerning  the  degree  of  control 
exercised  over  his  body  and  behavior  by 
natural  law,  it  is  most  puzzling  to  me  to 
note  to  what  an  extent  there  still  exists, 
among  many  persons  of  sufficient  educa- 
tion to  have  had  these  facts  brought  to 
their  attention,  a  disregard  of  the  neces- 
sary significance  of  these  facts.  I  can 
understand,  although  I  do  not  share,  a 
certain  feeling  of  repugnance  to  accepting 
the  situation  forced  on  us  by  scientific 
fact  and  logical  induction.  I  can  sym- 
pathize with,  although  not  accept,  the 
position  of  those  who  persist  in  wishing 
and  trying  to  look  on  themselves  and 
humankind  in  general  as  of  a  different 
clay  endowed  with  a  different  breath  and 
existing  in  a  different  sphere  from  the 
rest  of  life.  I  can  feel  the  egocentric 
97 


HUMAN  LIFE 

urge  that  leads  to  this  position  perhaps 
as  strongly  as  those  who  take  it,  but  I 
cannot  surrender  to  it  as  easily.  Scien- 
tific observation  and  cool  reason  prevent. 
How  can  one  accept  eagerly  and  grate- 
fully that  knowledge  about  our  bodily 
make-up  and  functioning  which  the  biol- 
ogist gives  us,  and,  on  the  basis  of  it, 
proceed  to  modify  our  behavior  so  as  to 
protect  ourselves  from  accident  and  dis- 
ease, and  help  ourselves  in  the  attempt 
to  adapt  ourselves  to  the  actual  condi- 
tions of  the  world  we  live  in,  and  yet 
reject  other  no  less  well  demonstrated 
facts  of  the  same  general  category  brought 
to  us  by  the  same  biologist,  but  the  ac- 
ceptance of  which  involves  a  recognition 
on  our  part  of  our  true  place  in  Nature. 
I  am  inclined  to  find  an  explanation  for 
this  popular  inconsistency  in  two  or  three 
different  causes.  For  one  thing  some 
biologists  have  gone  ahead  of  the  actual 
facts  with  their  justifiable  significance 
and  have  presented  the  world  with  hy- 
potheses instead  of  demonstrations  and 
98 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

have  insisted  on  an  acceptance  of  un- 
justifiable significance.  I  have  already 
called  attention  to  the  too  bold  assump- 
tions of  the  extreme  disciples  of  the 
mechanistic  school  of  life.  For  another 
thing  one  can  never  get  away  from  letting 
one's  own  observations,  with  all  their 
limitations  both  as  to  scope  and  accuracy, 
play  a  too  large  part  in  determining  one's 
judgments  about  any  matter  however 
technical,  and  however  demanding,  for 
correct  understanding,  of  a  certain  special 
training  and  equipment  on  the  part  of 
the  observer.  This  is  one  of  the  reasons 
why  the  professors  of  political  economy 
and  sociology  have  such  a  hard  row  to 
hoe.  Everyone  is  his  own  economist  and 
sociologist,  because  the  subjects  are  per- 
force under  everyone's  observation,  al- 
though this  observation  may  really  be 
very  limited  and  usually  is  of  a  most 
untrained  and  unmethodical  kind.  Pro- 
fessors of  astronomy  on  the  other  hand 
are  accepted  unhesitatingly  as  authorities; 
so  few  of  us  have  telescopes. 


HUMAN  LIFE 

Now  the  biologists  have  a  position 
between  these  extremes.  When  they 
talk  about  microbes  and  Dinosaurs  their 
statements  are  accepted  at  face  value. 
But  when  they  talk  about  human  beings, 
which  the  biologist  can  study  quite  as 
carefully  as  he  can  other  kinds  of  beings, 
there  are  reservations.  When  the  biol- 
ogists' talk  about  human  beings  is  limited 
to  statements  about  lungs  and  liver, 
skeleton  and  ductless  glands,  it  is  not 
questioned.  But  when  their  talk  is  about 
the  behavior  of  human  beings,  about 
their  psychology,  their  heredity,  their 
responses  to  environment  and  education, 
and  their  position  in  Nature,  then  their 
talk  is  tested  by  the  miscellaneous  per- 
sonal observations  and  prejudices  and 
desires  and  hopes  and  beliefs  of  each 
individual,  and  it  is  accepted  or  not  as  it 
confirms  or  contradicts  each  one's  notions 
derived  from  these  things.  We  all,  or 
most  of  us,  think  we  know  human  beings 
as  well  as  the  biologist  does.  Most 
assuredly  the  biologist  does  not  know  all 
100 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

that  is  to  be  known  about  human  beings, 
and  about  that  which  he  does  not  know 
we  must  certainly  be  permitted  to  accept 
our  own  guess  as  likely  to  be  as  good  as 
his.  But  we  are  too  likely  to  think  our 
own  guess  even  better  than  his. 

This  attitude  comes  largely,  I  think, 
from  a  feeling,  after  hearing  the  biologist 
talk  about  human  life,  that  his  considera- 
tion of  this  life  is  too  academic,  too 
technical,  too  detached  from  most  of 
those  things  that  make  up  our  immediate 
interests  and  fill  our  present  moments. 
As  important  as  war  may  be,  and  juvenile 
delinquency  and  eugenics  and  the  rela- 
tions of  social  inheritance  to  biological 
inheritance,  and  as  interesting  as  may 
be  the  problems  of  human  origin  and  the 
relation  of  the  human  species  to  other 
animal  kinds,  all  of  which  are  samples, 
as  I  have  indicated  in  our  earlier  dis- 
cussions, of  the  things  the  biologist- 
student  of  human  life  especially  talks 
about,  these  are  not  the  matters  of 
human  life  that  occupy  most  of  the  atten- 
101 


HUMAN  LIFE 

tion  of  most  human  beings  most  of  the 
days.  The  matters  that  do  so  occupy 
our  principal  attention  are  our  work  and 
recreation,  our  clothes  and  food,  our 
household  affairs,  our  health  and  our 
looks,  our  income,  expenditures  and  sav- 
ings, the  growing  up  of  our  children  and 
the  growing  old  of  ourselves,  our  family 
and  social  relations,  our  personal  con- 
tacts with  people  and  our  opinions  of 
them.  We  think  and  talk  about  books 
and  music  and  pictures,  about  railways 
and  bridges  and  motor  cars,  about  scenery 
and  climate  and  hotels,  about  politics 
and  diplomacy  and  governments.  And 
all  the  time  we  give  a  fascinated  attention 
to  the  particular  human  beings  con- 
nected with  these  things,  especially  the 
ones  we  personally  know  or  see.  We  note 
and  discuss  their  particular  idiosyncrasies, 
their  likenesses  and  differences;  we  com- 
pare them  with  each  other  and  with 
ourselves.  We  are  concerned,  constantly 
and  immensely,  with  individuals. 
It  is  right  here,  I  believe,  that  we  have  a 
102 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

clue  to  the  explanation  of  the  gulf  be- 
tween the  biologist-student  of  human  life 
and  the  everyday  observer  of  human 
life.  One  deals  primarily  with  the  species ; 
the  other  with  individuals.  One  gives 
his  attention  to  humankind,  the  other 
to  particular  human  creatures.  If  we 
knew  other  kinds  of  animals  as  in- 
dividuals— and  we  do  occasionally,  as 
when  we  have  a  particular  horse  or  dog 
or  cat  or  canary  for  companion,  or  scrape 
literary  acquaintance  with  Lobo  the 
Wolf,  or  Brer  Rabbit,  or  as  when  the 
farmer  or  his  daughter  goes  out  morning 
and  evening  with  the  milking  stool,  or 
the  pigeon  or  chicken  fancier  feeds  his 
pets ;  I  have  even  come  to  know  individual 
bees  in  my  glass-sided  observation  hives — 
if  we  knew  other  animals  as  individuals, 
I  say,  we  should  have  another  point  of 
view  regarding  them.  As  it  is  we  mostly 
do  not  know  other  animals  as  individuals; 
we  know  them  as  the  biologist  does,  as 
species.  But  as  species  they  do  not 
interest  many  of  us  very  much;  although 
103 


HUMAN  LIFE 

it  is  exactly  as  such  that  they  do  interest 
the  biologist.  And  it  is  primarily  as 
species  that  the  biologist  is  interested  in 
humankind — that  is,  when  he  observes 
humankind  as  biologist  and  not  as  just 
one  of  the  rest  of  us.  When  one  knows 
animals  only  as  species  the  interest  there- 
fore is  chiefly  biological;  when  one  knows 
animals  as  individuals  they  possess  a  new 
and  special  interest.  It  is  this  special 
interest  that  absorbs  most  of  our  atten- 
tion to  human  kind,  which  we  do  know 
primarily  and  particularly  as  individuals. 
That  is  what  really  holds  apart,  I  think, 
the  biologist  and  the  rest  of  us  when  the 
study  of  man  is  in  question.  That  is 
why  the  biologist's  information  to  us 
about  man  seems  academic  and  not 
pertinent:  it  leaves  us  cold.  And  why 
the  daily  newspaper's  information  about 
men  fascinates  and  thrills  us.  And  yet— 
and  yet — the  biologist's  information,  as 
far  as  he  can  confidently  go  with  it,  is  of 
huge  importance  to  us  as  individuals. 
Taken  into  account  and  acted  on,  it  can 
104 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

make  wiser,  less  wasteful,  more  capable, 
happier,  individuals  of  us.  It  can  help 
put  us  into  better  physical  and  mental 
harmony  with  the  world  we  simply  have 
to  live  in.  It  is  not  that  it  merely  makes 
life  safer  and  longer,  but  saner  and  larger. 
And  it  need  not  rob  us  of  the  hopes  and 
beliefs  that  many  of  us  cherish.  It  may 
do  nothing  to  encourage  them,  but  it 
cannot,  certainly  at  present,  make  us  give 
them  up.  And  I  do  not  think  it  ever  will. 


105 


HUMAN  LIFE 


THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  DEATH 

I  HAVE  had  during  the  very  writing 
of  this  paper  the  distressing  experience 
of  being  brought,  suddenly  and  dramat- 
ically, to  face  that  problem  of  human  life, 
that  to  most  of  us  is  the  greatest  of 
all  its  problems,  I  mean  the  problem  of 
death.  One  evening,  on  a  train  from 
Chicago  to  Washington,  returning  with  a 
companion  from  a  week's  association  with 
hundreds  of  other  scientific  men,  I  spent 
the  hours  between  dinner  and  bedtime 
discussing  with  my  companion  the  possi- 
bilities of  science  in  helping  us  to  under- 
stand Nature  and  Life.  He  was  a  man 
who  had  given  thirty  years,  with  all  the 
advantage  of  great  ability  and  highly- 
perfected  training,  to  scientific  study. 
He  was  withal  a  most  attractive  and 
lovable  personality.  We  parted  at  the 
evening's  end  with  smiles  of  friendship 
and  mutual  encouragement  to  push  on 
106 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

with  the  task  that  we  had  in  common. 
In  the  morning  I  found  him  dead  in  his 
berth. 

What  does  the  biologist  have  to  tell  us 
of  death?  Well,  first,  true  to  his  profes- 
sional interest,  he  tells  us  of  the  facts  and 
the  significance  of  the  death  of  species. 
He  points  to  the  hosts  of  extinct  kinds  of 
animals,  dead  species,  revealed  by  the 
fossils  in  the  rocks.  He  shows  us  how  this 
death  of  successive  species  reveals  and 
is  itself  a  part  of  organic  evolution,  the 
greatest  fact,  and  its  revelation  the  great- 
est glory,  in  biological  science.  Death 
of  species  is  at  once  the  revelation  and 
the  proof  of  the  struggle  for  existence 
with  the  consequent  survival  of  the  fit. 
Dead  species  have  been  the  stepping 
stones  to  new  species;  their  history  is  the 
history  of  organic  evolution.  Species  are 
unfit,  or  become  unfit,  for  various  rea- 
sons; among  them,  the  reason  of  over- 
specialization.  This  is  rather  surprising, 
for  all  organic  evolution  is  a  movement 
from  generalization  toward  specializa- 
107 


HUMAN  LIFE 

tion,  and  yet  in  the  very  acquirement  of 
this  specialization  are  sown  the  seeds  of 
species  death.  What  organisms  gain  in 
specialization  they  lose  in  plasticity. 
They  become  so  adapted  that  they  lose 
adaptability.  Progress  in  one  direction 
involves,  as  someone  has  said,  the  closing 
of  the  gates  in  countless  other  directions; 
progression  thus  means  a  succession  of 
lost  opportunities.  The  Irish  stag  spe- 
cializing in  antlers  was  brought  by  too 
large  antlers  to  species  death.  The  great 
Dinosaurs,  lords  of  their  epoch,  extin- 
guished themselves  by  too  much  much- 
ness. There  are  even  analogies  of  these 
biologic  happenings  in  human  history. 
And  there  are  even  biologists  who  see  the 
triumphantly  super-specialized  species, 
man,  in  actual  danger  of  species  death 
from  too  much  specialization. 

But  one  of  the  major  lines  of  human 
specialization  is  what  might  be  called  a 
specialization  in  the  direction  of  safety 
from  over-specialization;  it  is  a  specializa- 
tion in  general  adaptability,  not  in  par- 
108 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

ticular  adaptation.  Man  has  become 
able  to  follow  varying  natural  conditions. 
I  have  recently  read  a  fascinating  paper 
on  "Forests  and  Human  Progress."  In 
it  the  author,  Dr.  Zon,  gives  a  seizing 
picture  of  human  civilization,  first  in  a 
stage  of  being  dominated  by  forests, 
then  in  the  stage  of  successful  struggle 
with  forests,  and  finally  in  the  present 
stage  of  domination  of  forests.  Some- 
what similar  stories  could  be  told  of  man 
and  oceans,  man  and  mountains,  man 
and  deserts,  man  and  climate.  Man's 
narrow  biologic  specialization — think  of 
the  narrow  limits  of  temperature,  oxygen, 
food  and  other  conditions  in  relation 
to  his  mere  maintenance  of  life — is  offset 
by  his  wide  social  inheritance  and  his 
educability.  This  gives  him  power  to 
withstand  and  dominate  antagonistic  Na- 
ture: even  power  to  add  the  forces  of 
Nature  to  his  own  forces.  He  fights 
against  natural  selection;  he  substitutes  a 
purposeful  artificial  selection  for  it.  His 
possession  of  consciousness,  reason  and 
109 


HUMAN  LIFE 

volition,  by  which  he  makes  effective  a 
scientific  method  or  technic  of  success- 
ful struggle  with  nature,  seems  to  insure 
him  against  species  death,  at  any  rate  in 
any  geologically  near  future.  Cataclys- 
mic world  change  would  wipe  him  out 
easily,  so  specific  is  his  biological  adapta- 
tion to  present  conditions;  but  slow 
change,  and  that  seems  the  geologic  rule, 
finds  him  well  protected,  so  developed 
is  his  power  of  conscious  adaptability 
and  his  partial  control  of  the  conditions  of 
life.  "What  a  plastic  little  creature  man 
is!"  said  Emerson.  "So  shifty,  so  adap- 
tive! His  body  a  chest  of  tools  and  he 
making  himself  comfortable  in  every 
climate,  in  every  condition!" 

But  it  is  not  human  species  death  but 
human  individual  death  that  most  of  us 
look  on  as  the  problem  of  death.  It  is 
here,  as  always,  in  individuals,  including 
our  individual  selves,  not  in  species,  that 
most  of  us  are  principally  interested. 
And  when  we  ask  the  biologist  about 
what  he  can  tell  us  of  death  we  are  not 
110 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

asking  him  about  species  death  but 
individual  death;  the  death  of  our  rela- 
tives and  friends,  the  death  of  my  com- 
panion just  as  he  had  reached  his  greatest 
usefulness  for  science,  for  humanity,  his 
greatest  power  for  achievement  and, 
because  of  it,  his  greatest  joy  in  living  and 
our  greatest  loss  in  his  passing.  What  has 
the  biologist  to  say  about  this  kind  of 
death? 

Truly,  very  little.  He  can  explain  or 
describe  death,  as  it  affects  the  body,  in 
more  precise  terms  than  we  commonly 
use;  he  can  describe  the  particular, 
irreversible  physical  and  chemical  changes 
that  characterize  or  are  physical  death 
in  the  exact  terminology  of  science  and 
indicate  the  immediate  specific  causes 
that  set  up  these  changes,  but  this  is  very 
far  from  satisfying  us.  To  explain  to  us 
that  the  human  body  is  a  machine  which 
differs  from  other  machines  with  which 
it  may  be  compared  in  that  when  once 
stopped  it  cannot  be  set  going  again,  is 
not  in  the  least  to  solve  for  most  of  us  the 
111 


HUMAN  LIFE 

great  problem.  Is  death  really  just  what 
it  seems  and  what  the  biologist  describes 
it  to  be,  or  is  it  what  so  many  would  like 
it  to  be,  hope  it  is,  and  even  firmly  believe 
it  is?  Can  the  human  individual  have  an 
ethereal  spirit  existence  apart  from,  or 
after,  his  bodily  machine  existence?  Is 
man  immortal?  That  is  what  we  insist 
on  asking  the  biologist  who  assumes  a 
knowledge  beyond  that  of  most  of  us 
concerning  human  life. 

The  biologist,  unless  he  be  a  scientific 
bigot,  confesses  at  once  the  limitations  of 
his  knowledge.  He  does  not  claim  that 
his  description  of  individual  death  neces- 
sarily tells  the  whole  story.  But  he  claims 
that  it  tells  it  as  far  as  the  kind  of  evi- 
dence which  he  can  accept  as  telling  him 
things  he  can  rely  on  now  permits.  His 
attention  has  been  called  to  a  great  and 
heterogeneous  array  of  alleged  evidence 
or  proof  of  spirit  existence.  We  confront 
him  by  the  great  intellectual  difficulty 
that  most  of  us  have  in  accepting  what 
seems  the  awful  waste  of  Nature  and  of 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

man  himself  in  having  lifted  humankind, 
both  as  species  and  individual,  to  such  a 
peak  of  evolutionary  development,  if 
death  ends  it  all.  Just  because  a  single 
part  in  the  complex  material  machine, 
or  association  of  engines,  that  was  my 
friend's  body,  suddenly  breaks  down,  is 
that  the  end  of  his  story?  One  evening 
all  that  nature  and  man  had  done  for 
him  were  available  for  our  good  and  his 
happiness.  The  next  morning,  because  a 
trivial  mechanical  disharmony  prevailed 
during  the  night  over  what  had  been 
for  fifty  years  mechanical  harmony,  he  is 
nothing  more  to  us  or  himself.  This 
seems  preposterous,  incredible.  Must  we 
accept  it,  biologist? 

Sadly  he  answers,  I  can  give  you  no 
comfort.  That  same  waste  of  Nature's 
efforts — if  it  really  is  waste — is  apparent 
all  through  the  realm  of  life.  This  fish 
produces  a  million  eggs  when  only  a  few 
will  successfully  develop  into  new  indi- 
viduals. How  many  thousand  to  one  are 
the  odds  against  the  successful  achieve- 
113 


HUMAN  LIFE 

ment  of  the  extraordinarily  complicated 
life  history  of  one  of  those  internal 
parasitic  worms  which  demand  successive 
entrance  into  the  bodies  of  two  or  more 
hosts  to  complete  its  development?  This 
unconscious  waste  of  Nature  is  no  less 
preposterous,  incredible  to  me,  he  says, 
than  that  every  now  and  then,  consciously 
flying  in  the  face  of  what  seems  to  be  all 
self-interest,  all  enjoyment  of  life,  all 
reason,  millions  of  men  swarm  out  of 
their  homes,  to  use  all  their  energy, 
all  their  native  cunning,  all  their  hard-won 
scientific  knowledge,  to  kill  each  other, 
to  bring  intense  suffering  to  their  wives 
and  children,  to  destroy  their  accumu- 
lated material  possessions,  to  burn  the 
created  glories  of  their  artist  geniuses,  to 
work,  in  a  word,  all  the  waste  and  misery 
that  are  the  inevitable  accompaniments 
of  war.  Is  this  less  incredible,  he  asks, 
than  that  nature  should  tolerate  the  ex- 
tinguishing after  a  period  of  functioning 
of  the  complex  of  elaborately  built  up 
machines  which  is  the  human  body? 
114 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

And  he  adds  that  the  same  extinguishing 
comes  to  every  other  animal  machine,  to 
all  other  living  bodies.  Do  you  ask  for 
something  to  continue  after  death  of  the 
pet  dog,  the  favorite  riding  horse,  the 
bird  you  shoot  as  game,  or  the  insect  you 
crush  under  you  feet?  I  find  no  proof, 
scientific  proof,  he  says,  that  death  is  not 
the  end  of  these  creatures.  And  you  do 
not  ask  me  to  believe  otherwise  because 
of  some  desire  or  belief  on  your  part  that 
death  is  not  their  end.  Well,  no  more  do  I 
find  any  proof  of  the  kind  I  am  familiar 
with  and  content  to  accept,  that  death  is 
not  the  end  of  man.  I  do  not  say  that 
death  is  the  end;  that  I  have  scientific 
proof  that  it  really  is  the  end,  but  I  have 
no  proof,  yet,  that  it  is  not  the  end. 
The  strong  desire  and  hope  and  that 
next  conscious  state,  belief,  which  you 
suggest  to  me  as  proof  to  you  that  death 
does  not  end  all,  are  not  the  kind  of  proof 
on  the  basis  of  which  I  ask  you  to  accept 
what  I  do  really  feel  able  to  tell  you  as 
facts  about  human  life,  facts  many  of 
115 


HUMAN  LIFE 

which  you  are  inclined  to  accept  on  my 
word. 

Nor  have  I  been  able  to  find  proof,  the 
kind  of  proof  that  proves  things  to  me, 
of    immortality    by    attending    spiritist 
seances  or  in  reading  the  volumes  of  the 
Society  for  Psychical  Research  or  the 
many  other  books  that  recite  the  expe- 
riences of  alleged  participators  in  or  ob- 
servers of  things  of  after  death.    I  should, 
indeed,  truly  be  appalled  by  death,  the 
biologist  says,  and  it  would  have  a  ter- 
ror for  me  greater  than  it  has  even  as  a 
possible    complete    extinguisher    of    my 
personality,  if  it  meant  that  it  was  the 
beginning  for  me  of  a  perpetual  personal 
spirit  existence  in   which  my  thoughts 
and  conversations  were  to  be  of  the  kind 
exampled  by  those  recorded  in  the  Psychi- 
cal Research  and  spiritist  books.     I  do 
not  wish  to  spend  a  spirit  existence  re- 
sponding to  calls  from  earth  to  describe 
the  quality  of  the  cigars  that  I  am  per- 
mitted to  enjoy  in  my  eternal  life  beyond. 
But  in  the  same  breath  the  biologist  says, 
116 


AS   THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

if  he  is  not  a  bigoted  biologist,  that  he  has 
no  right  to  say  and  will  not  say  that  there 
cannot  be  a  human  spirit  life,  nor  a  human 
immortality,  despite  the  fact  that  he  has 
seen  no  spirits  and  that  the  only  immortal- 
ity he  has  been  able  to  discover  among  liv- 
ing creatures  is  that  of  those  one-celled  ani- 
mals and  plants  which,  barring  accident, 
reach  in  a  few  hours  or  days  after  birth  a 
maturity,  not  followed  by  natural  death, 
but  by  a  division  of  the  whole  body  into 
two  parts  each  of  which  is  an  independ- 
ent new  individual,  requiring  but  another 
few  hours  or  days  to  grow  and  develop  and 
reach  maturity,  and  to  divide,  in  turn, 
into  two  more  continuing  individuals. 
Even  this  immortality  seems  to  require 
for  its  full  realization  certain  occasional 
special  stimulating  physical  or  chemical 
conditions,  for  after  a  few  hundred  suc- 
ceeding generations  of  this  self -perpetua- 
tion the  series  tends  to  run  out.  Natural 
death  tends  to  appear.  So  that  perhaps 
after  all  this,  at  first  sight,  tangible,  observ- 
able material  immortality  is  only  delusion. 
117 


HUMAN  LIFE 


THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  SOUL 

BUT,  I  say  again,  the  biologist  who  is 
not  a  bigot  cannot  authoritatively  and 
hence  will  not  try  to  affirm  that  there 
cannot  be  human  immortality.  He  sim- 
ply remains  agnostic.  He  does  not  know. 

Then  there  is  the  cognate  matter  of 
soul  in  the  living  body.  The  biologist 
sometimes  has  a  difficult  time  trying  to 
understand  what  other  people  understand 
by  soul.  If  sweetness  of  disposition  or 
amiability  of  character  is  a  symptom  of 
soul,  as  he  is  told  by  some,  then  he  finds 
soul  in  many  animals.  I  had  two  taran- 
tulas once  in  my  laboratory,  one  of  which 
was  a  morose,  ugly-tempered  brute  who, 
whenever  I  approached  him  with  playful 
finger,  became  angry  and,  rearing  on  his 
hinder  two  pairs  of  legs  and  unfolding  his 
great  poison  fangs,  made  ready  to  lunge 
and  strike  whenever  his  malicious  intel- 
ligence assured  him  that  he  could  reach 
118 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

and  wound  me.  But  the  other  tarantula, 
of  the  same  kind  and  found  in  the  same 
field,  would  let  me  fondle  him  and  would 
walk  in  friendly  fashion  up  my  bare  arm 
without  ever  a  thought  of  hurting  me. 
He  was  a  sweetly  dispositioned  tarantula. 
You  see  I  have  used  terms  in  describ- 
ing the  behavior  and  character  of  these 
spiders  that  we  generally  reserve  for  ac- 
counts of  human  behavior  and  charac- 
ter. And  if  you  say  that  I  should  not 
attribute  character  or  disposition  to  them 
but  should  limit  myself  to  describing  their 
manner  of  behavior,  because  we  do  not 
know  that  their  behavior  was  controlled 
by  their  disposition — chemical  or  physical 
stimuli  may  have  controlled  it — then  I 
reply  that  I  can  quite  as  easily  and  much 
more  confidently  describe  the  similarly 
contrasting  behavior  of  two  human  in- 
dividuals in  terms  that  we  usually  limit 
ourselves  to  in  describing  animal  be- 
havior. The  difference  is,  we  have  had 
so  much  experience  with  human  individ- 
uals, that  is,  have  made  so  many  ob- 
119 


HUMAN  LIFE 

servations  and  so  many  experiments  on 
them,  that  in  our  search  for  the  springs 
of  this  behavior  we  have  become  accus- 
tomed to  feel  justified  in  saying  that  such 
and  such  behavior  indicates  such  and 
such  kind  of  disposition,  a  large  or  small 
possession  of  kindliness,  or  as  some  might 
interpret  it,  soul.  If  we  knew  tarantulas 
better  we  might  be  able  to  use  the  same 
generalization  and  discriminate  among 
them  as  fairly. 

Mother  love  reveals  the  human  soul, 
says  one;  but  mother  love  is  a  common- 
place among  the  higher  animals  and  some 
of  the  less  high.  Love  and  sacrifice  of 
self  for  family  and  community  prove 
soul:  well,  the  worker  bee  works  till  it 
falls  dead  on  the  threshold  of  the  hive 
with  honey  sac  or  pollen  baskets  filled 
with  food  which  it  is  bringing  home  to 
feed  the  babies  and  queen  and  drones  of 
the  hive.  Faith  in  an  all-wise  and  all- 
kind  God  proves  the  soul  in  us.  The 
primitive  Africans  have  no  less  faith 
although  their  God  is  made  of  wood  or 
120 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

mud.  John  Muir's  dog,  Stickeen,  seems 
to  have  had  no  less  faith  in  his  master 
at  whose  insistence  he  leaped  the  danger- 
ous glacier  crevasse  that  seemed  too  wide. 
Had  Stickeen  a  soul?  The  young  robins 
that  make  their  first  flutterings  from  the 
nest  perhaps  have  faith  in  the  parent 
birds'  assurances.  Are  they  soulful? 

But  other  people  mean  other  things 
by  soul :  they  mean  the  creative  imagina- 
tion, the  capacity  for  a  self-expression  of 
the  wonderful  things  in  them.  Man's 
mind  is  so  wonderful,  as  evidenced  by 
his  discoveries,  his  inventions,  his  poetry 
and  music  and  painting,  that  you  say 
there  simply  must  be  more  than  brain- 
cells  and  nerve  fibrils  as  basis  for  them; 
there  must  be  soul  in  him.  But  a  simple 
physical  injury  or  disharmony  in  these 
material  body  tissues  means  a  prompt 
end  to  all  these  wonders.  A  boy  com- 
panion of  mine  was  called,  because  of 
what  he  could  do  in  music,  a  genius. 
He  fell  one  day  from  a  gate  post  and 
struck  his  head  against  a  stone.  In 


HUMAN  LIFE 

a  few  weeks  he  was  as  strong  a  boy  as  he 
had  been  before  but  he  was  no  longer  a 
genius.  There  was  no  longer  any  soul  in 
his  music.  Was  it  his  soul  that  struck 
against  the  stone?  In  that  great  gray 
building,  the  hospital  called  Salpetriere, 
in  Paris,  there  are  a  thousand  human 
beings  whose  brains  and  nervous  systems 
do  not  work  in  orderly  fashion;  they  are 
not  hopelessly  insane:  they  are  tempora- 
rily, some  perhaps  permanently,  mentally 
unbalanced,  hysterical.  For  the  time 
being  they  show  little  sign  of  soul;  but 
when  they  are  cured  they  will  have  soul 
again.  Soul  seems  to  mean,  or  at  least 
to  require,  continuing  mental  balance. 

The  brain  is  a  wonderful  instrument 
in  some  human  beings:  in  others,  whole 
communities  or  tribes  of  others,  it  now 
enables  its  possessors  to  count  no  more 
than  five.  Human  reason  does  wonders: 
so  does  the  instinct  of  the  social  wasps  and 
the  fungus -farming  ants.  The  Brooklyn 
Bridge  is  a  triumph  of  engineering:  so  is 
the  orb-web  of  the  garden  spider.  I  do 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

not  mean  that  there  is  no  difference 
between  the  brain  of  man,  on  which  seems 
to  depend  a  part  at  least  of  his  soul, 
and  the  cephalic  ganglion  of  the  ant. 
But  may  not  this  difference  be  one  of 
mass  and  histologic  differentiation  and 
organizations,  rather  than  of  fundamen- 
tal kind  or  quality,  that  is,  may  it 
not  be  quantitative  rather  than  qualita- 
tive? For  all  practical  purposes,  as  I 
said  in  the  first  paragraphs  of  my  first 
paper,  this  difference  may  be  such  as  to 
make  two  very  different  sorts  of  crea- 
tures out  of  men  and  ants  but  is  one  to  be 
assumed  to  be  fundamentally  foreign  to 
the  other?  So  fundamentally  foreign  that 
one  means  soul  and  immortality  and  the 
other  only  carnality  and  clay?  Perhaps 
it  is:  I  do  not  know. 

Much  that  means  soul  and  human 
attributes  assumed  to  be  peculiarly  and 
fundamentally  derived  from  some  source 
other  than  one  common  to  other  forms  of 
life,  has  been  plausibly  shown  by  biol- 
ogists and  sociologists  to  be  a  highly 
123 


HUMAN  LIFE 

developed  derivative  of  more  animal- 
like  attributes.  Love  may  be  a  beautiful 
outgrowth  from  the  animal  necessities 
of  reproduction  and  protection;  charity 
from  the  requirements  of  an  advantageous 
development  and  exercise  of  altruism  in 
the  case  of  an  animal  species  which  has 
adopted  the  mutual  aid  principle  in 
evolution  rather  than  the  mutual  fight 
principle;  hope  and  belief  may  be  the 
by-products  of  a  brain  development  that 
has  outrun  biological  utility  even  as  the 
Irish  stag's  antlers  outran  advantage 
in  size.  But  I  need  not  dwell  on  these 
iconoclastic  ingenuities  of  the  cynical 
materialist.  They  are  familiar  to  you  and 
have  already  been  accepted  or  rejected 
by  you;  by  some  of  you  on  a  basis  of 
reason,  by  others  on  a  basis  of  emotion. 
Emotion  itself  is  a  great  problem. 
There  are  fundamental  emotions  or  con- 
scious states  such  as  fear  and  hunger  and 
sex  interest  which  are  plainly  closely 
related  to  the  brute  part  of  our  life,  and 
other  less  fundamental  or  derived  emo- 
124 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

tions,  such  as  desire,  hope  and  confidence 
leading  to  belief,  and  doubt  and  de- 
pression, leading  to  despondency,  which 
are  apparently  a  product  of  our  more 
intellectual  life.  But  that  is  to  say  that 
they  differ  from  the  fundamental  emo- 
tions common  to  other  animals  as  well 
as  ourselves  only  because  of  our  more 
elaborate  and  superior  nervous  develop- 
ment. These  derived  emotions  are  among 
the  particularly  distinguishing  attributes 
of  human  life  as  compared  with  animal 
life  and  play  a  great  part  in  all  of  our 
everyday  living.  We  see  more  of  them, 
are  impressed  more  by  them  and  think 
more  about  them,  under  ordinary  cir- 
cumstances, than  we  do  of  the  more 
fundamental  emotions,  but  how  quickly 
and  powerfully  the  fundamental  emotions 
dominate  us  under  circumstances  which 
strip  off  for  the  moment  our  veneer  of 
social  inheritance  and  so-called  peculiarly 
human  qualities.  The  war  revealed  this 
vividly,  although  it  also  revealed  how 
some  individuals  had  arrived  at  a  stage 
125 


HUMAN  LIFE 

in  human  evolution  which  enabled  them 
to  dominate  their  brute-inheritance  in  a 
most  wonderful  and  encouraging  way. 

An  authorized  lecturer  representing  a 
certain  organization  with  many  adherents 
stated  in  an  address  in  Washington  the 
other  evening  that  the  world  is  a  mental 
phenomenon  and  hence  that  all  the 
things  we  know  in  it  are  controllable  by 
mind,  or  indeed  are  simply  manifestations 
of  mind.  That  rather  seems  to  put  in  the 
hands  of  each  person  possessing  mentality 
the  power  to  do  things  to  or  with  this  old 
world  and  the  conditions  of  life  on  it 
much  as  he  wills  to  do  them. 

I  must  confess  that  the  biologist  sees 
the  world  differently.  He  finds  it  com- 
posed of  a  lot  of  things,  and  sees  going  on, 
in  and  about  it,  a  lot  of  things  which 
are  hard  to  reduce  to  mental  phenomena 
and  hard  to  make  amenable  to  his  desires 
and  control.  He  realizes,  of  course,  that 
without  the  sense  organs  and  brain  no 
one  would  have  much  awareness  of  the 
world;  that,  indeed,  one  might  think  it 
126 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

non-existent.  Color  is  color  to  us  and 
sound  sound  only  after  a  mental  percep- 
tion. But  the  different  ether  waves  which 
are  perceived  by  us  as  color  and  the 
atmospheric  waves  as  sound  might  per- 
fectly imaginably  go  on  coursing  through 
the  ether  and  atmosphere  although  no 
human  or  animal  sense-organs  and  brains 
perceived  them.  In  fact  the  physicist 
is  quite  sure  they  would.  If  a  photo- 
graphic plate  got  in  the  way  of  the  light 
waves  and  a  phonographic  plate  in  the 
way  of  the  sound  waves  the  existence  of 
these  waves  would  be  mechanically  reg- 
istered. 

In  Stanford  University  a  number  of 
years  ago  I  used  to  walk  down  an  avenue 
lined  with  trees — I  believe  they  were 
trees — to  the  beautiful  quadrangle  of 
buildings,  with  a  companion,  now  a 
distinguished  professor  of  philosophy  in 
an  important  Eastern  university,  who 
proved  during  our  walk  each  morning 
by  what  was  to  me  a  verbally  irrefutable 
logical  argument  that  there  were  no  trees 


HUMAN  LIFE 

along  our  way  and  no  quadrangle  before 
us.  However,  when  after  successfully 
avoiding  the  tree-trunks,  we  reached  the 
quadrangle  we  entered  it  quite  naturally 
and  unsurprised,  and  went  on  under  its 
arcades  to  take  up  our  duties  in  our 
respective  class  rooms  in  it.  We,  or 
rather  the  professor  of  philosophy,  had 
simply  had  a  pleasant  after-breakfast 
exercise  in  mental  gymnastics.  We  had 
done  our  other  gymnastics  before  break- 
fast. 

The  biologist  is  willing  to  bet  his  life 
that  much  of  the  world  really  exists  in  a 
material  sense.  If  the  philosopher  and 
I  were  standing  on  a  railway  track  with  a 
locomotive  engine  tearing  towards  us  at 
fifty  miles  an  hour  he  might  prove  to 
me,  if  there  was  time,  by  his  interesting 
play  of  words  and  logic,  that  nothing 
was  there  and  hence  nothing  was  going 
to  happen  if  our  non-existent  bodies 
continued  to  stand  still  on  the  non- 
existent railway.  But  I  would  win  my 
bet  that  something  very  distressing  would 
128 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

happen  unless  we  stepped  off  the  track, 
and  that  pretty  quickly. 

The  biologist  is  a  homely  and  practical- 
minded  person  who  is  little  given  to  over- 
refined  logic  and  debate  but  much  given 
to  observation  and  experiment.  He  be- 
lieves that  his  eyes  and  ears  and  brain 
help  him  to  the  saving  and  enjoyment  of 
life  by  enabling  him  to  know  and  adapt 
his  behavior  to  the  world  he  lives  in. 
The  man  who  makes  the  world  all  mental 
may  have  reached  a  higher  kind  of 
Weltanschauung  than  the  biologist,  but 
the  biologist,  as  far  as  I  know  him, 
is  not  going  yet,  for  the  sake  of  ascend- 
ing to  this  higher  plane,  to  give  up 
remembering  what  happened  to  the  man 
who  doesn't  step  off  the  track,  nor  will 
he  give  up  keeping  his  leg  muscles  in  trim 
for  a  quick  jump.  His  low  and  materi- 
alistic Weltanschauung  is  perhaps  suffi- 
ciently indicated  by  his  using  as  argument 
his  readiness  to  bet  his  life  and  his  enjoy- 
ment of  life  on  what  he  thinks  he  knows 
about  the  reality  of  matter  and  energy. 


HUMAN  LIFE 

But  he  knows,  if  he  is  a  wise  and  honest 
biologist,  what  I  have  so  often  repeated, 
namely,  that  he  doesn't  know  it  all. 
When  the  future  or  destiny  of  the  human 
individual  are  the  subject  of  inquiry  the 
biologist  has  little  more  to  say  than  I 
have  already  indicated.  He  remembers 
his  laboratory  and  tells  what  he  has 
observed  in  it.  Then  he  remembers  his 
wife  and  child  and  himself,  and  his  heart, 
not  the  heart  of  his  laboratory  experi- 
ments, fills  with  such  thrilling  emotions 
and  his  brain  conjures  up  such  pictures  of 
possibilities  for  himself  and  his  family 
and  for  all  humankind  that  he  wonders  if 
he  is  really  the  same  being  that  observes 
things  in  a  laboratory  or  museum.  His 
laboratory  tells  him  what  a  precarious  and 
fragile  thing  life  is,  how  material  and 
condition-ruled  and  circumscribed  a  liv- 
ing creature  is.  But  his  wife  and  child 
and  his  own  consciousness  tell  him  how 
much  more,  how  immeasurably  more, 
there  is  in  life  than  he  learns  in  his 
laboratory.  It  is  this  extra-laboratory 
130 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

observation  and  realization  of  the  possi- 
bilities and  actualities  of  human  life  that 
make  it,  even  to  the  biologist,  the  vivid, 
many-colored,  suggestive,  thrilling  thing 
it  is,  the  thing  so  full  of  occasionally 
realized  great  moments  and  of  glimpses 
of  infinitely  great  possibilities  that  some- 
times it  seems  all  mystery,  all  something 
more  than  of  this  world,  and  hence  all 
something  quite  hopeless  to  study  by  the 
methods  of  his  science,  or  even  quite 
hopeless  profitably  even  to  wonder  about. 
Why  not  take  it  and  make  the  most  of  it? 
And  then  comes  the  insistent  question: 
Ah,  how  make  the  most  of  it?  And  he 
becomes  again  the  patient  struggling 
student  of  biology,  that  is  the  laws  or 
conditions  of  life. 


131 


HUMAN  LIFE 


THE  BIOLOGIST  AND  THE  FUTURE 

THE  chief  goal  of  science  is  not  merely 
to  describe  the  phenomena  of  matter  and 
life;  it  is  to  determine  by  long  and  close 
observation  and  ingenious  and  repeated 
experiment  the  order  or  regularity  of 
Nature,  and  hence  to  arrive  at  the  position 
of  being  able  to  say  what  will  happen 
under  given  conditions,  in  other  words,  to 
prophesy.  The  goal  of  the  biologist — 
however  unattainable  or  most  limitedly 
attainable  arrival  at  it  may  now  seem  to 
be — is  to  be  able  to  speak  with  confidence 
of  the  future  behavior  or  fate  of  living 
things;  of  living  things  as  individuals  and 
as  groups  and  kinds.  The  biologist 
really  aims  at  being  able  sometimes  to 
speak  confidently  about  the  future  and 
destiny  of  humankind.  It  is  well  to  hitch 
one's  wagon  to  the  stars.  A  Kansas  poet 
once  exclaimed:  "I'll  wear  Aldebaran  as 
a  bosom-pin." 

132 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

If  the  biologist  finds  himself  now,  as  we 
have  already  pointed  out  that  he  does, 
quite  unable  to  say  much  worth  listening 
to  about  the  future  of  human  beings  after 
death,  he  is  at  least  ready  to  venture  some 
suggestions  about  the  future  of  the  human 
species  in  its  material  relations  to  the 
world  and  world  conditions  it  lives  in, 
and  about  the  possibilities  or  probabilities 
of  its  further  development  or  evolution. 

This  evolution  is  a  fundamental  ele- 
ment in  life.  Primarily  it  simply  means 
change,  but  history,  geologic  and  bio- 
logic history,  has  shown  that  this  change 
has  been  progressive,  it  is  change  forward 
and  upward.  What  causes  it  we  do  not 
know,  despite  our  glimpse  of  some  of 
its  factors;  what  it  really  is  we  do  not 
know,  despite  our  sight  of  its  results. 
"Some  call  it  Evolution,  and  others  call 
it  God,"  sings  William  Carruth.  But  it 
is  real.  Human  life  today  is  what  it  is 
because  of  it;  human  life  will  be  tomor- 
row what  it  will  be,  because  of  it.  Is  the 
biologist  in  position  to  hazard  prophecy  as 
133 


HUMAN  LIFE 

to  the  future  course  of  human  evolu- 
tion? 

As  Conklin  has  pointed  out,  progressive 
evolution  of  special  lines  of  animals  and 
plants  has  limits  fixed  by  its  very  nature. 
Evolutionary  progress  of  animal  bodies 
means  specialization  of  the  structure  and 
functions  of  these  bodies.  Specialization, 
as  we  have  indicated  earlier  in  this  dis- 
cussion, means  closer  adaptation  to  a 
certain  set  of  conditions  of  life  but  also 
means  surrender  of  general  adaptability. 
If  an  animal  has  given  up  legs  for  the 
sake  of  having  flippers  or  wings  or  hands, 
it  has  acquired  a  more  specific  use  of  its 
limbs  at  the  expense  of  a  more  general  use 
of  them.  Now  man  has  gone  a  long,  long 
way  in  the  progressive  evolution  of  his 
body  and  its  functions.  But  it  is  appar- 
ently true,  as  Conklin  has  said,  that  for 
ten  thousand  years  there  has  been  no 
notable  progress  in  this  evolution.  If 
evolution  is  carrying  man  forward— 
and  we  do  not  doubt  it — it  is  doing  it  in  a 
different  way.  This  way  seems  to  be  the 
134 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

way  of  social  evolution,  based  on  man's 
social  inheritance  and  the  biologic  factor 
of  mutual  aid.  If  so,  we  have  not  to  look 
forward  to  future  man  as  a  physically 
different  man — unless  indeed  he  gives  up 
a  little  more  of  that  original  physical 
equipment  which  enabled  him  to  live 
successfully  in  Glacial  Time  as  "animal 
among  animals" — but  we  have  to  see  man 
of  the  future  as  the  possessor  of  an  ever 
more  elaborate  and  higher  development 
of  social  inheritance,  and  more  and  more 
capable,  by  virtue  of  this  social  inherit- 
ance, of  an  inhibition  of  the  vestigial  brute 
carry-overs  in  his  biological  inheritance. 
That  means,  in  ultimate  analysis,  that 
future  man  can  be  consciously  deter- 
mined by  man  today,  that  human  evolu- 
tion has  been  turned  over  to  human- 
kind itself  to  direct. 

What  an  opportunity,  but  at  the  same 
time  what  a  responsibility!  Poor  star- 
fishes and  clams,  poor  ants  and  bees,  and 
all  the  other  little  animal  brothers  to  man 
whose  fate  and  future  are  all  in  the  laps 
135 


HUMAN  LIFE 

\ 
of  the  gods  of  Nature.    How  they  must 

envy — if  they  can  envy — that  fortunate 
big  brother  man  who  can  make  his  future 
life  what  he  will,  who  is  his  own  chief 
factor  in  his  own  evolution.  Some  com- 
munism-mad men  sometimes  hold  up 
before  us  the  perfect,  machine-turned, 
communal  life  of  ants  and  bees  as  a  model 
for  humankind  to  copy.  Do  they  realize 
what  an  ant  or  a  bee  is  born  to?  An 
individual  life  entirely  scheduled;  a  per- 
sonal knowledge  as  large  at  birth  as  it 
ever  will  be;  a  personal  fate  that  can  all 
be  told  by  the  first  seeress  applied  to,  and 
a  species  fate  all  in  the  hands  of  a  coldly 
impersonal  and  pitiless  Nature.  I  some- 
times feel  sorry  for  the  bees.  If  they 
have  sunshine  and  flowers  they  have  also 
the  dark  and  crowded  hive.  And  within 
and  without,  their  every  hour  is  sched- 
uled, their  every  activity  predetermined. 
I  have  even  felt  so  exercised  about  the 
bees  that  I  have  written  a  little  book 
about  them  in  which  I  have  imagined  a 
bee  heroine  called  Nuova — who  is  a  new 
136 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

bee  born  into  the  hive  who  revolts 
against  the  monotony  and  fatalism  and 
hopelessness  of  usual  bee  life.  Like  other 
books  with  heroines  it  has  a  happy  end- 
ing, but  it  wouldn't  if  it  were  a  scientific 
text-book. 

Compared  with  the  bees  and  all  the 
other  animal  kinds  whose  fate  as  species 
depends  on  external  circumstances  and 
inexorable  natural  law  and  whose  evolu- 
tionary progress  is  dependent  on  occa- 
sional fortuitous  germinal  variations  pro- 
ducing small  somatic  changes  of  selective 
advantage,  what  an  opportunity  man  has 
to  determine,  within  limits,  the  course  and 
even  the  rapidity  of  his  own  evolution. 
But  also  what  a  responsibility! 

Here  is  where  the  biologist  becomes  the 
preacher  and  exhorter.  Here  is  where 
biology  and  the  appeal  to  reason,  where 
technical  knowledge  and  common  sense, 
where  science  and  religion  join.  The 
soundest  of  science  leads  us  to  the  con- 
clusion that  man,  by  virtue  of  the  pos- 
session of  a  social  inheritance,  as  con- 
137 


HUMAN  LIFE 

trusted  with  the  biological  inheritance 
which  is  all  the  inheritance  that  other 
animal  species  have,  a  social  inheritance 
which  gives  him  the  present  realities  and 
the  future  possibilities  of  a  social  evolu- 
tion in  addition  to  his  more  personal 
evolution,  has  in  his  own  hands  a  great 
instrument  for  determining  the  fate  of 
himself  as  species;  the  future  of  mankind. 
This,  of  course,  is  what  the  preacher  and 
the  poet  have  always  said  -about  man, 
though  on  a  basis  of  other  conceptions  as 
to  how  man  has  been  given  this  power. 
But  whatever  the  foundations  for  the 
agreement  between  scientist  and  preacher 
in  their  common  conclusion,  the  interest- 
ing and  important  thing  is  that  they  do 
agree  and  hence  that  they  can  reinforce 
each  other  in  appealing  to  man  con- 
sciously to  direct  his  efforts,  with  all  his 
advantage  of  scientific  knowledge  and  all 
his  strength  of  belief,  to  the  production 
of  a  higher,  a  socially  and  morally  higher, 
future  man  type. 

Thus  these  discussions  of  "human  life 
138 


AS  THE  BIOLOGIST  SEES  IT 

as  a  biologist  sees  it "  seem  to  have  a 
proper  moral,  even  as  tested  by  so  suspi- 
cious a  critic  of  biology  as  religion.  After 
all,  the  biologist  does  not  see  human  life, 
in  its  larger  and  higher  aspects,  so  differ- 
ently from  the  everyday  observer  or  the 
poet  and  preacher.  He  sees  wonderful 
possibilities  in  it,  which  man  himself 
can  help  to  make  realized.  Now  if  only 
the  everyday  observer,  poet,  and  preacher 
would  see  human  life  in  regard  to  those 
aspects  on  which  the  biologist  is  able  to 
throw  some  special  light,  more  as  the 
biologist  sees  it,  everything  would  be  all 
right.  The  biologist  is  quite  convinced 
on  the  basis  of  a  kind  of  knowledge 
which,  on  the  whole,  has  proved  itself 
to  all  the  world  as  a  reliable  kind  of 
knowledge,  and  one  that  stands  the 
test  of  time  and  liveableness,  that  man 
can  learn  much  about  himself  from  bio- 
logical study,  and  rely  much  on  what  he 
learns  in  this  way  to  help  make  his  life 
safer  and  saner,  and  himself  more  capable 
of  achievement,  and  hence  happier.  Bi- 
139 


HUMAN  LIFE 

ology  is  not  a  science  for  its  own  sake 
alone.  It  is  a  science  eminently  useful 
and  practical  to  man  and  at  the  same 
time  it  is  a  science  highly  inspiring  to 
him.  For  if  it  be  depressing,  as  it  may 
be  to  some,  though  it  is  not  to  me,  that 
it  teaches  him  that  man's  life  is  close 
brother  to  all  the  rest  of  life,  yet  it  is 
inspiring  in  that  the  same  time  it  reveals 
how  wonderfully  much  has  been  done  by 
Nature  in  making  man,  and  how  now 
man  has  been  let  into  partnership  with 
Nature  for  making  better  man.  We  are 
not  a  foreign  matter  or  being  imposed  on 
Nature  but  Nature's  own  proudest  prod- 
uct. And  the  power  we  have  for  further 
and  higher  development  is  not  our  own 
unaided  power  but  that  of  our  own  and 
Nature's  in  combination.  It  is  a  com- 
bination that  should  have  almost  limitless 
possibilities. 


140 


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BIOLOGY   LIBRARY 


OCT  2-1-  1932 
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